


In Grover's Mill

by odetteandodile



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (for the people you care about not for everybody don't hold me to that), Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, First Time, Halloween, Implied Period Typical Homophobia, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-War, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Science Fiction, War of the Worlds AU, and as always, decimation of the human race solves homophobia sweet, not without you, somewhat thematic so i'm tagging it, they don't know each other so it's a meet-stressful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-04 17:38:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 38,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16351148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odetteandodile/pseuds/odetteandodile
Summary: Grover's Mill, 1938--Strange green projectiles have been spotted in the night sky, originating from the vicinity of Mars. When they fall it's not the space rock and meteorite dust everyone expects, but something much, much worse.Steve Rogers is working at a newspaper in a small town, trying to move away from the memory of his mother's death in New York when the landings happen. When things go badly, he finds himself in the company of a young soldier also making his escape and they throw their lot in together--doing what they can at what seems to be the end of the world.War of the Worlds AU based on the idea that Orson Welles' broadcast was the real deal.





	1. Eve of the War

**Author's Note:**

> Did you know it's the 80th anniversary of Orson Welles' infamous radio program about aliens landing in New Jersey at the end of this month? Fun! This fic is in honor of that, and of course with all the Steve/Bucky feels you'd hope for. 
> 
> Based a little on the book, a little on the radio show, and a little on the 1978 rock opera (listen I know that sounds weird but if you have any love for electric cello and eerie narrated music do yourself a favor and check it out!). Foreknowledge of any of those isn't necessary (but if you have it you will enjoy the Easter eggs!). 
> 
> Updating regularly between now and Halloween, read and enjoy!

_“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own…across an immense ethereal gulf…intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us…”_

 

It doesn’t seem, as Steve stands at his window that night, that there is anything particularly momentous happening. 

Certainly the strange green comets that had appeared in the sky three nights before are curious, unsettling even. Each night there are new flares, and new trails of green that cut across the sky—beautiful but disturbing against the normally tranquil stretches of the night sky. 

But on this final night it is still distant in every possible way—and besides Steve having had to stay late at the office the night before to rework the front page to make room for an interview with Ogilvy, it has yet to make its mark on anything but the fringes of Steve’s awareness. 

In that he isn’t alone. In fact there are plenty in the town of Grover’s Mill who’ve paid it even less attention than he has—people who go about their business without ever turning their eyes heavenward. At night when the stars come out they are interested only in the cool surface of their pillows. And before now, the lack of interest has never much made a difference in their lives. 

But the year is 1938—and Grover’s Mill and the world are soon to learn the price of their disinterest. 

Steve stands at the window of his little cubbyhole of a boarding house room, eyes fixed on the eerie green trails—noticeably closer tonight than they were the night before. 

He shivers a little at the oddness of them. But he doesn’t take his eyes away either, drawn to it. Dr. Ogilvy, the astronomer from Princeton and self-appointed expert, has been making the rounds this week to all the papers, Steve’s included, explaining all sorts of things about meteors and gravitational events. Steve hadn’t conducted the interview—too junior a writer for a front page story like that. But he has the impression the man is full of shit, pulling an explanation out of thin air because he enjoys the attention. 

The projectiles seemingly originated from somewhere in the vicinity of Mars. And since it’s been an otherwise slow news week, the strange shooting stars have captured public attention with wild speculations—and Ogilvy keeping busy reassuring everyone that the chances of anything living coming from Mars are a million to one. 

A knock on his door brings Steve out of his thoughts, and he says “come in” without turning, already knowing it will be Mrs. Sanderson his landlady. 

“You sitting around in the dark up here?” she asks. 

Steve glances over his shoulder to look at her silhouetted in the doorway, “Just watching the meteor shower.” 

Mrs. Sanderson scoffs audibly. “You and the whole gosh-darned town. There’s a phone call for you. Your editor.”

Steve sighs, turning away from the window. “Thanks Mrs. Sanderson, I’m coming.” 

Though Steve’s been at _The Mill Tribune_ well over a year, he’s still the lowest staff writer on the totem pole, so Dugan the editor calling him after work hours is bound to herald something tedious. Maybe more senior writers get calls late in the evening for some exciting, breaking story. For Steve it usually means (at least once a week) that whoever is supposed to be staffing the floor and keeping an eye on the police scanner in the office has begged off to go drink instead, and that Steve’s in for another boring night of dozing at his desk. 

“Rogers,” Steve says, lifting the phone receiver wearily. He’s always weary these days, it seems.

“Steve I need you on something,” Dugan booms on the other end without preamble. 

“Eben call out?” Steve asks. Eben isn’t usually one of the ones who shirks scanner duty but there’s a first for everything. 

“Nah, it’s this space thing. Ogilvy thinks one’s going to be coming down pretty close to town late tonight—three or four he estimates. He’s gonna have a bunch of his students and shit out there to take a look at whatever lands and I wanna make sure it hits the morning edition.”

Steve sighs again. An outing like that promises even less sleep than staying at his desk. “Where?” 

“Few miles east up the River Road’s where they’re setting up. He says the thing’ll probably break up when it hits the atmosphere but whatever lands might make some kinda crater. Probably just a bunch of space rock only the eggheads care about but people have been loving this space shit so I figure somebody ought to write it up.” 

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be there.” 

“Good, get it to me by six and we’ll rush it for print. Three inches—six if it’s really interesting and I’ll bump the luxe soap advert to page ten. Got it?” 

“Got it,” Steve replies. 

“Don’t be late,” Dugan says, and then the line goes dead. 

Steve shakes himself a little and glances at his watch. He can just get in a few hours of sleep before he’ll need to get a cab out to the supposed site. He knows Dugan well enough to know the man will still expect him at his desk tomorrow even after a three a.m. assignment—which is why it’s coming to Steve and not one of the guys with a wife or kids or anybody who’d be inconvenienced by an overnight excursion. 

It isn’t that Dugan dislikes him, Steve knows, it’s just the way things work. Steve was used to fighting for every chance he could get back in New York, and it hadn’t surprised him to find that life isn’t much different in a small town. Here it’s just that the boys’ club—the boisterous and brash gang of newspapermen who write for the _Tribune_ —have all known each other since childhood. They have connections in town that Steve can’t match—so like it’s always been, all he can really do is put his head down and be dogged and stubborn until they can’t ignore him. But for the time being, it means some truly bad beats.

Sometimes he thinks about going back to New York. But any time the notion occurs to him, he can’t help but think it isn’t worth it, since his ma isn’t there. New York without anybody who knows him would just be another big city trying to swallow him whole. At least out here in the sticks he has a steady job and a room in a decent boarding house and he doesn’t have to fight quite so many people for what he wants. Steve’s not sure exactly what he does want enough to fight for it yet, unmoored by his mother’s death, but he rents a room better than he had in New York and eats three square meals a day. That’s something. 

After her death, Steve had searched for something that would take him away from the city—better to live in the backwoods of New Jersey even than to haunt the shadows of his old life instead. 

Steve huffs as he trudges back up the stairs to his dark room, unable to help the welling of bitterness and sorrow that always overtakes him when he lets himself think about it. 

He flops down on his bed, not bothering to kick off his shoes, and sets his little kitchen timer to wake him in three hours. He’s not sure if he’ll be able to sleep, but he’s going to close his eyes and pretend to for prudence’s sake anyway. 

It’s promising to be a long, boring night.

 

Ultimately, Steve’s body takes over and he does fall asleep. But it’s just for long enough that when he wakes to the tinny sound of the kitchen timer he comes back to consciousness groggy rather than rested. 

But on the upside, Mrs. Sanderson grants him the use of her car in exchange for a promise to help her with her shopping later in the week, as her son will be out of town and unable to help. It’s nice of her, especially considering that he would obviously have helped anyway without the favor—but Steve’s more than happy to accept rather than having to pay for taxi fare when he doesn’t know exactly where he’s headed. 

That question quickly answers itself as he turns the headlights of the car onto the dark stretch of the Old River Road heading east out of town. Before Steve has gone more than a mile, the bright trail of green above him flares bright enough to burn itself onto his corneas cutting across his view through the windshield. Steve slams his brakes in the middle of the road, blinking the flash out of his eyes. 

Ahead of him, there’s a new fiery glow to the low hills. The thing has landed early. 

Steve accelerates again, pushing the car as fast as he can manage on the dark country road in the direction of the light. 

The glow is dimming by the time Steve arrives at the site, receding into a large, smoking crater in a field. There are already bodies swarming around it, and somebody is setting up a large floodlight. Steve recognizes Ogilvy shouting orders at some of the people flocked about as he parks the car on the shoulder and tumbles out. 

“It’s hot!” Steve hears Ogilvy yell as he approaches, “stay well back, the atmosphere will have heated it to thousands of degrees!”

There’s excitement in his voice, which isn’t unexpected, but Steve is more interested in the expressions of the other on-lookers—it isn’t the intrigued, intellectual curiosity he’d imagined but something of a mix of fear and astonishment warranted by more than bits of meteor. 

He steps up to the edge of the crater and peers down into it. 

Nestled in the blasted earth isn’t rock—but metal. A smooth, shining cylinder free of edges or blemish of any kind, about thirty feet in diameter. 

It isn’t something created by nature. 

“What in the name of Christ is that thing?” says a man softly to Steve’s left. Steve glances over and finds a police officer he recognizes from town—an older man, hard-bitten and world-wise—gazing down at the cylinder with barely contained horror. 

“Ogilvy have any ideas?” Steve asks him, pulling his notepad out of his back pocket to jot down notes as fast as he can take them. He sketches the thing too, quickly, for good measure. 

The policeman shakes his head, still not taking his eyes off the cylinder. “Not that he’s shared yet. He’s excited as a piglet in a mud pit…about as coherent as a pig too. Just squealin’ so far.”

Steve looks across at where Ogilvy is skittering back and forth over the rim of the pit, and he has to agree with the assessment. The man is waving his arms, and his grey hair is standing up in every direction like he’s been pulling on it. His face is flushed in the floodlights. 

“This is unprecedented—un _precedented_!” he exclaims, as if anybody in the field might be asking themself if this sort of thing happens frequently elsewhere. 

Looking around at the curious, discomfited faces of the milling crowd, Steve thinks that Ogilvy is alone in his reaction. Even his helpers, presumably also students of astronomy from the University, keep looking askance at it as they scurry around the pit at his direction. 

Nobody seems sure of what to do. 

Which is when a low rumbling sound begins, somewhere under the noise of people talking. Steve looks around in alarm, but only a few people are paying attention. He’s surprised at first, because with his bad ear he’s usually the last to pick these things up, but then he realizes that it’s less a sound and more a tremor of the earth under his feet. 

But it’s soon joined by a muffled, metallic hammering. A rhythmic thump. Now everyone in the field turns to look at the cylinder again. Because it’s coming from inside. 

“There—there’s someone trapped in there!” Ogilvy yells, and one of his students grabs him by the elbow to keep from tipping into the pit as he flails at the edge. “Somebody—we need tools, a blow torch—somebody fetch us—we have to help him!” 

“It must be—there must be a man inside—perhaps a weapon test from the fort,” the policeman says to no one in particular, his voice uncertain as if he’s convincing himself of it. 

The hammering stops, replaced by a long, slow scrape of metal against metal. 

A circle appears against the previously blank surface of the cylinder, about two feet across, separating itself from the rest of the metal. It moves slowly, unscrewing in careful twists. 

Steve’s heart is racing, but he—like everyone else—can’t seem to take his eyes off the shining protrusion of the threaded screw. 

Soon there are two feet of solid silver standing out from the rest. Then the piece falls with a clang to the bottom of the pit, leaving a dark void of circle open in the side of the cylinder. 

“A rope!” Ogilvy yells, before somebody with more sense—the grocer from town, Steve recognizes—claps a hand over his mouth. The clearing around the pit is dead silent for a long moment. 

Then two, disk-like eyes appear over the edge of the porthole, followed by one undulating, slithering tentacle. 

A scream breaks the silence, and it’s as if someone has turned the sound back on in the field, everyone talking and shouting over one another—half of the onlookers immediately falling back and half pressing forward as if drawn against their will to the terrible sight. 

Another tentacle joins the first, and the thing in the cylinder—the Martian, Steve realizes with a shock like a gunshot—heaves itself up and out of the opening. Its body is bulky, clumsy even though it moves easily, the size of a bear with skin that glistens like wet leather in the glinting floodlight. It falls to the bottom of the pit, and the doorway of the pod is filled with another, and then another. 

The one in the doorway looks up to the lip of the pit, its eyes for a moment seeming to focus on Steve, pinning him with its gaze in horrified fascination. The eyes are bulging from what one might call a face, set above a lipless, V-shaped mouth dripping saliva. Its whole body heaves and pulsates convulsively, framed in the door before dropping down to join its companion and freeing Steve from its stare. He stumbles back over the uneven ground. 

The first Martian climbs torturously up the side of the crater, and the people still spread over that edge run headlong to get away from it. Some of the younger men turn to face it, pushing the ladies who had been observing behind them.

The thing raises one of its long, snakelike arms, brandishing something that gleams in the lamplight. Steve only has time to note that it appears to be some sort of long funnel—when an ear-splitting shriek, unnatural and mechanical emits from it along with a ghostly ray of light. 

All three of the young men standing opposed to the creature burst immediately into pale, blue flame, succumbing to ash faster than any of them can even cry out. The ground beneath them and several shrubs catch fire. 

The milling crowd turns toward all out panic. 

Steve, on the far side of the crater from the first beast, sees another climbing up nearer to him, and at last breaks into a run as well. He runs clumsily, unable quite to keep his eyes on where he’s going as they’re drawn inexorably to the lurching forms behind him and the flare of their weapons. 

A woman trips in front of him, and he stops to haul her up best he can, grabbing her elbow and dragging her toward the road and his car thinking only of escape—they have to get away from the pit, from that ray—they need to let somebody know—somebody with guns and armor—

He skids to a halt at the car, unlocking it with fumbling hands and calling out to a pair of teenagers whose faces are mindless with terror, urging them to climb in. Nearby others are reaching vehicles and piling in as well, but behind them Steve can again hear the eerie, high pitched wail of the heat ray and see new flames licking over the field. 

He slams on the accelerator of the car, nearly clipping the grocer’s truck as he pulls back onto the road in what turns into a small line of cars all racing as fast as they can up the dark country road. Vehicles fill both lanes recklessly in their haste to get away. 

Steve keeps on the tail of the grocer’s truck, unable to think clearly, sensing that any moment their car may be caught, bursting into blue flame like the bodies in the clearing. His breathing is ragged, and behind him in the back seat one of the teen boys is keening, a wordless, animal sound of fear. 

The trail of cars all end up in the town center, in front of the police station as if everyone who’d witnessed the scene in the field is unable yet to separate, fear and disbelief binding them. Two dozen or so panicked people tumble from their vehicles in confusion. 

A voice finally cuts through, and everyone turns to look, desperate for direction. 

“Everyone go back to your homes!” Steve’s eyes find the policeman who he’d stood beside at the crater, standing on the hood of his police car, hands cupped around his mouth. “We’ll notify the authorities—get reinforcements from Fort Dix. Go _home_. There’s nothing you can do here—phone family if you can to let them know to stay inside until the army can sort this out!” 

The man, calm and authoritative now with a clear mission, jumps from the hood of the car and runs back into the police station without waiting to see if his orders are followed. But around Steve, people are nodding, still looking shaken but less wild. The scene from the field—so incomprehensibly awful and strange—fading slightly in the calm serenity of the deserted town square. _The army_ , Steve hears people agreeing, _yes the army will handle this_. 

Quickly, the bodies filling the street begin to move away again, some in cars and some on foot. Everyone seems keen to surround themselves with the familiar safety of home and to comfort themselves by following the orders of the policeman. 

Steve looks around and finds the woman he’d helped already gone. His eyes land on the pair of teenage boys, one still silent and staring, the other with his arm around his friend. 

“Can you get home alright?” Steve asks the calmer one. He swallows hard but nods, steering his friend away. 

Steve draws in a shaky breath, slumping against the door of his car with dread still coursing through him. He thinks about going back to Mrs. Sanderson’s boarding house—but he can’t quite imagine it. Returning to his dark room as if nothing had happened. 

Over the edge of the hills Steve can see a faint glow, and he isn’t sure if it’s something new and terrifying, the Martians and their invisible, deadly rays of fire—or simply the same steely grey of dawn which touches them every morning. 

He turns away from the car, pointing himself instead toward the offices of the _Tribune_.


	2. Fight and Flight

Steve awakes from a haunted, uneasy sleep with a stiff neck and a lurch of his heart as he thinks he hears the echoes of metallic hammering. 

He sits up with a start, staring around wildly before he realizes he’s at his desk in the _Tribune_ , Dugan peering down at him over crossed arms looking mildly impressed. 

“You up Sleeping Beauty?” he asks. 

“Yeah,” Steve gasps, still getting his bearings and rubbing his bleary eyes. The other desks are slowly starting to fill, and he can hear now the whir of the printing press downstairs churning out the morning edition. 

“Good.” Dugan tosses a copy of the paper, still warm from the press onto Steve’s desk, and Steve stares down at it blankly for a moment. 

“Took those off you while you were snoozin’, didn’t think you’d object. Above the fold Rogers, nice work last night.” 

The front page of today’s paper bears the headline MARTIAN LANDING IN GROVER’S MILL: ARMY ARRIVING IN FORCE. Underneath it is one of the drawings Steve had composed feverishly after letting himself into the dark offices the night before, and the story compiled from his notes. Dugan must have plucked them off the desk while Steve slept. 

Any other day or story or time it would have elated him beyond comparison to see his byline on the front page of the _Tribune_ , something he’s been working toward over a year. But he can’t take any pleasure in it today. 

“The army?” he asks Dugan, looking up from the page. 

The big man nods, unfolding his arms to lean both hands on Steve’s desk. “Been rolling through town since about six this morning. Whole armored division from Fort Dix—coupla tanks, some artillery. Looks like they’re setting up a perimeter about three miles up.”

Steve’s sighs heavily in relief, slumping back in his desk chair. Dugan raises an eyebrow. 

“Say tell me, what you wrote up, the picture—you didn’t… _embroider_ it a bit?”

Steve shakes his head vehemently. “I—I couldn’t if I tried. Don’t think I really even—that doesn’t really do it justice.” 

Dugan lets out a low whistle, pushing his perennial bowler hat up out of his face. “Sheee-it.”

“You thought I was exaggerating but you still ran it?” 

He shrugs. “It’s a killer headline. Nobody else around had the scoop yet—figured it was worth some embroidery to beat ’em out.” 

Steve huffs a little, not certain he’d have done the same. In fact, he wonders if it’s entirely wise to have run the thing at all, especially with his sketches. If it’s going to cause more trouble than good. But he reconsiders—if it warns even a handful more people that they ought to stay at home and not go out to see what the soldiers are up to it’s still worth it. 

“They’ve got it out on the radio too,” Dugan adds, eyeing Steve’s face as he runs through these thoughts, “if it makes you feel better about it. We’re just the first ones to show ’em a visual’s all.” 

Ah, that _is_ a different thing then, Steve thinks. And he’s glad there are warnings that most people will be hearing. He shudders at the thought of the three young men incinerated by the Martian’s ghastly ray. 

“Rogers, get out of here,” Dugan says, his brow furrowed in concern, and Steve realizes he’s been staring into the distance with who knows what expression on his face. But he shakes his head. 

“I—I’m fine.” 

“Hmph. Last batch of papers is nearly on the truck—they’ve gotten out almost everywhere. Gonna be a quiet day until the army locks this shit up. You can go sleep or something, I’ve got somebody else who can man the phones.” 

“I—I’ll take the afternoon off,” Steve reassures him. Or at least tries to reassure him, Steve isn’t sure if his voice sounds a little too pleading to be effective. But Dugan takes pity on him. 

“I want you out of here by three.” 

“Yessir.”

Dugan turns on his heel, disappearing through the newsroom and barking an order at somebody else arriving. It leaves Steve to take several long, calming breaths at his desk, trying to school his heart back into a usual rhythm. 

But he really can’t stomach the thought of going back to the boardinghouse. Falling asleep at his desk was driven by sheer exhaustion and bodily necessity, but he knows that if he laid his head on the pillow to attempt it on purpose he could never fall asleep. And he wants to be nearer the town center when and if there’s any news. 

Still, there isn’t much to occupy him here and Dugan doesn’t come back out of his office to offer him any new assignment that might distract him. So Steve drifts, replaying the nightmarish scenes of the night before, imagining what’s happening on the other side of those hills even now.

The next time Steve comes around to notice his surroundings it’s because of a general shuffling and buzz through the offices that he realizes must mean lunchtime. His stomach forcefully confirms the realization, reminding him that he hasn’t had anything to eat since dinner at the boardinghouse the night before. So dutifully he pulls on his trench coat and hat, and lets himself be swept up in the crowd of reporters and print-men flowing out of the _Tribune_ building and onto the street below. 

It seems incredible to Steve that there would be anything open—anywhere to go to eat, when everyone with sense ought to be shut up in their houses waiting for news on the radio that it’s safe again. 

Instead what he finds is a Grover’s Mill that appears to be totally unaffected by the events of the night before, everyone going about their business as if nothing has happened. The only sign that anything unusual is occurring just a few miles up the road are subtle—the police station is packed out with the full force of officers, and the grocery store (owned by a man who’d actually been present in the field) is closed, as is the library. 

Steve goes to his usual corner news stand to buy the paper, out of curiosity more than anything. 

“Shouldn’t you be home today?” Steve asks the old man who runs the stand. 

“Why?” he replies, gruffly, making change. 

“Because of—for all this?” Steve says, incredulously gesturing with the newspaper, from which glares his hasty sketch of the Martian. 

“Bah,” the man says eloquently, waving his hand. “You young people get all worked up over every little nonsense. Bet we never even hear another word about that hoax.” 

“I—but it’s not!” 

He shrugs, spitting out a mouthful of tobacco into an empty coffee can. “I don’t buy it. Man’s gotta do business to eat.” 

Steve doesn’t try to argue any more with him. But he hears the sentiment repeated by several more townsfolk as he buys a sandwich at the shop next door and sits at a cramped table outside to eat. 

It gives him a strange, disconnected feeling—like maybe he did imagine the whole thing. The images from the night before are hazy, clouded by fear and adrenaline and the inherently strange, unearthly quality of them so he can’t tell if he’s remembering it right. He shakes his head, glancing over at the shuttered grocery store. He wasn’t the only one who’d seen what happened out there. 

Steve finishes his sandwich quickly, all his actions still a bit frantic despite himself. He glances up the street, bustling as it ever is at lunch hour, with a frown of concern. Nobody else will be in the office again for a good half hour yet, so he figures a walk may help to stretch out his back, cramped up and stiff from too little sleep in his wooden desk chair. 

He finds himself drawn toward the edge of town, powerless against a potent mix of curiosity and nerves. 

When he reaches the spot where the buildings peter out into more open space, and the main street of Grover’s Mill turns into a country lane, he stops, eyes fixed on the hills. 

A car rumbles up on his left, making its steady way out of town. Steve can’t help but wave to the driver in alarm, and the car pulls over to a stop, the driver leaning toward the window. 

“Hey! You’re not headed out that way are you?” 

“Sure am,” says the man, who Steve identifies by his black coat and dog collar as the rector of one of the local parishes. “Want a lift?”

“I—no!” Steve exclaims, “What are you—don’t you read the paper?” 

“Yes I do, son. Which is how I know so far nobody’s tried anything but guns out there—it’s my Christian duty to—”

Steve cuts him off, flapping his hand, “Look, Parson—”

“—Father—”

“ _Father_ , this—it isn’t what you think, it wasn’t _people_ that landed, they tried to kill everyone in that field! You can’t—”

The rector’s chin sets itself mulishly, and he shakes his head. 

“Somebody has to at least try the right thing here, son.” 

“I—I know but—” Steve tries helplessly, wondering how he can make the man understand. But the rector is stubborn, and already putting the car back into drive. 

“I’ll be going now, if you don’t need anything else,” he says, “bless you child.”

And with that the man pulls away from the gravel and back onto the road, taking off in the direction that Steve is sure offers only harm. Steve watches his car receding along the empty road, running a hand distractedly through his hair. What in god’s name is he—yes, literally in the name of _God_ what is the man thinking? 

Steve watches him drive off until the car is nearly to the bend where it would disappear into the countryside. Then it stops, red brake lights flaring. 

Steve frowns, squinting against the sun—is he turning around? Maybe he let Steve’s words sink in and…

But that’s when Steve hears the rapid _rat-tat-tat_ of guns firing in the distance. 

He stands stock-still, paralyzed, watching in fascination as the rector’s car is suddenly surrounded by other vehicles—three army jeeps swerving around it on the road, and a tank careening over the green of the hillside beside. 

And behind them, rising skeletal and strange against the blue sky are three other, less recognizable shapes stalking close behind. But Steve knows it must be _them_.

The things are massive constructions of metal, thirty feet tall at least, each topped with a shining silver dome and supported by three spiderlike legs that move with horrifying speed across the ground. As Steve watches, two more of the tripods crash their way out of the trees on the other side of the road. 

Each machine is brandishing a familiar, funnel-like instrument, and Steve isn’t sure if he hears or simply remembers the wail of them as the forest and hillsides catch instantly into flame. 

He sees one of the looming hoods turn, questing, and the beam of the creature’s heat ray focus on the rector’s car. It takes only a few moments of the pale intensity before the whole vehicle is burning, the metal of it melting and warping into the road. 

Steve doesn’t watch any more, shoving the thought of the poor, foolish man out of his mind and hurtling himself back up the main road into the busier parts of town—where the Martians are clearly making their way too. 

He’s shouting before he even sees anybody to hear him, hoping desperately that most people got wise and took shelter somewhere. A few curious heads turn his way as he waves his arms, telling people to take cover. Mostly he gets worried looks—until someone, looking over his shoulder, points toward the skyline and screams. 

Steve looks back over his shoulder and sees the outline of two of the machines clearing the first of the buildings headed into Grover’s mill. A jeep bearing several soldiers careens down Main street past him, blaring the same warning to _take cover!_ over a megaphone. With the authority of the military behind the order, and the otherworldly creatures in sight, people finally listen. 

An animal, heart-stopping shriek sounds over the noise of panic, first one voice and then picked up by another and another of the monsters. It’s not the mechanical shrill of the heat ray, and Steve realizes that this sound is the Martians themselves—a hunting cry. 

At the noise, the street descends immediately into blind chaos, and Steve is swept up in a crowd of bodies pressing forward, driving headlong in any direction that is _away_. It’s the same reaction of the people from the field the night before, only now it’s the entire town losing its mind and being overtaken by the instincts of prey. 

But Steve is struck with the terror too, infected, and he doesn’t have any better idea than the rest simply to run as far as he can get from the striding machines. He can smell burning, and when he looks over his shoulder he sees that the edge of town is engulfed in flame. There are dark clouds of black smoke too, too dense to be entirely from the burning structures—and Steve realizes it’s coming from the tripods, stifling anyone caught in the midst of it. He returns his gaze forward, pushing his legs even harder.

Grover’s Mill isn’t a large place by any stretch, and it doesn’t take long for crush of people to reach the end of it, where Main Street crosses a wide bridge over the Millstone River. 

The remaining soldiers and a handful of reinforcements are set up facing back toward town along the bridge, faces grim as they get ready to make their stand, with no time or attention for the fleeing townsfolk. 

The crowd immediately scatters, some heading for the army blockade, slipping past them across the bridge, and many others breaking left and right and disappearing into the cover of trees on either side of town. Steve hesitates, then heads for the bridge. Maybe, if there’s a stand to be made, he can do something there to help the soldiers make it. 

But he’s still a hundred yards out when the wail of the heat ray sings above him. Trees on either side of the river ignite, and the soldier’s guns fire above the heads of the people still trying to escape. 

Suddenly, Steve is knocked to the ground, clipped by a man in a butcher’s apron so that they both sprawl to the ground. Steve just has time to look up when a great metal foot comes down by his head and he curls convulsively into himself, expecting to be crushed at any moment. But nothing happens. 

He glances up and sees the Martian in its huge metal machine stop, looming over the soldiers. The tank fixes its gun on the thing, firing into its shiny underbelly. The dome explodes, splattering shards of metal and fragments of flesh across the ground all around Steve as he scrambles to his feet. 

The creature topples, destroyed. But that hideous yell echoes out again from the other five, which turn their guns on the line of artillery—heat rays blasting. 

Steve gasps as the tank is melted in on itself, the same way as the rector’s car had been, but now he’s close enough to smell the hot acrid scent of metal coming off of it, choking him. 

He moves away from the bridge, stumbling down the river bank. Above him he can hear the last tapering rattle of the machine guns as the Martians decimate the remaining force. 

He sloshes into the water, glancing above where the spindly things are exulting, setting fire to the rest of the buildings at the edge of town and sending their black smoke into the line of the trees where others had fled. 

There’s a splash near him, and Steve reaches out blindly to grasp at the foundering arms and pull whoever is struggling there up from the water. It’s a young soldier, jacket singed and face bloodied. It looks like he’d been knocked from the bridge into the river, perhaps making him the only member of his company to have survived—he stares back at Steve with wide, unseeing eyes as Steve grips his arms. 

The metal leg of a machine crashes down the bank as one of the things aims its ray toward the trees. The soldier surges forward as if to run, but Steve, eyes fixed on the lurid flash of the heat ray, realizes that there isn’t anywhere to escape burning with the things this close and moving on legs two or three stories tall. 

Instead he slams himself into the panicked man, wrapping his arms around him and hurtling both backward into the river, under the cover of the water. 

The man kicks for a moment, then seems at least to understand, clutching Steve as well. After as long as one breath holds they break the surface momentarily, both gasping before plunging under again and letting the current carry them—hopefully covered and away from danger. 

Steve can feel his lungs growing tight as he holds onto his breath as long as he can, and a new fear overtakes a corner of his mind. Or rather a very old one, born of long experience. Not now, he pleads with his lungs, desperately. 

They rise to the surface again for air, and now they’re on the other side of the bridge and the creatures—far enough to keep their heads just slightly above the surface as the swift water of the river continues to sweep them away. 

Steve’s lungs heave, fighting for air, but he can tell that the asthma attack isn’t going to be held off for long—not after the run through town, the smoke in the air, and being too long under the water. He can feel his head getting lighter, and his grip on the soldier slipping, his fingers no longer able to obey him as his lungs seize and his brain fights for oxygen. 

_Maybe it’s better, after all, to die this way_ , is the last thought he remembers before he’s consumed entirely by darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus, enter Bucky. 
> 
> Let me know what you think so I can feed off of your comments and kudos ;)


	3. The Young Soldier

Steve’s body hurts too much for him to be dead. 

It takes him several moments of cataloguing the aches in his spine and chest and head before he realizes that the reason everything is still dark is that he hasn’t managed to open his eyes yet. 

He cracks his eyelids with an effort like lifting a car. It’s marginally brighter outside of them than it is inside, and he’s grateful actually to the dim light. His head is throbbing. 

Now his abused lungs reassert themselves into the conversation, and Steve doubles over involuntarily over a sudden, wracking cough. He tries to catch his breath, to force them to calm down again. _There’s nothing to cough up_ , he assures his brain, _just stop_. 

He holds his breath for a moment, letting the urge to cough pass before drawing air in shallowly. 

And he realizes that he’s not the only one coaxing his body to relax and stop fighting him—there’s a hand on his back, rubbing slow, steady circles. 

Steve uncurls, hesitantly, and sits up blinking. 

The young soldier from the river is sitting beside him, eyes wide with concern, though he immediately yanks his hand away as Steve sits up. 

They’re in a small, indoor space, Steve realizes squinting around. It looks like some kind of boathouse—a canoe hangs from hooks on one wall, and there are various other pieces of equipment scattered around for fishing and the like. 

Steve’s eyes come back to the man beside him. His face is strained, eyes bruised dark with exhaustion and fear, but it doesn’t do anything to detract from the fact that he’s undoubtedly handsome. His jaw, nose, and cheekbones are all strong lines, softened by curves—a shadowed dip in his chin, a bow-shaped upper lip, and wide blue eyes. There’s a scrape over one eyebrow from his fall, and his uniform still smells slightly of burnt wool, otherwise you would never know what he’d just been through. 

Steve is extremely surprised to see him. 

“I—the river—?” Steve manages to rasp, not really sure what he’s asking. 

The man nods. “You were—I think you had an attack maybe? Couldn’t breathe I guess…I kept you above the water ’til we floated far enough to—to climb out.” 

His voice is hushed, and Steve isn’t sure if it’s from fear that they’re still yet being hunted, or just in deference to the still quiet of the fishing hut. 

“You—you saved me,” Steve says, dropping his eyes in embarrassment. It doesn’t help really, since they land on a blanket tucked tightly around his shoulders, and he immediately has to imagine the scene of the soldier carrying him from the river, tucking him up here like a drowned rat. 

But the soldier shakes his head. “You saved me first, pal. I would’ve—” he stops, clenching his jaw. “It was smart thinking, going into the water. Wouldn’t have gotten much further than everybody else up there trying to run off on foot.”

Steve looks up into his eyes again in surprise. Maybe not a charity case then, or a burden—but a bond of honor. A life for a life. 

“Steve Rogers,” he says, holding out a hand that he’s unhappy to find still trembles slightly. 

“Bucky—Bucky Barnes,” replies the soldier, grasping it. Steve notes that his hand isn’t entirely without a tremor either. 

“Bucky is…a name.” Steve comments, one stiff corner of his mouth quirking up despite himself. 

A small smile crinkles the corners of the other man’s eyes too, and he gives a huff of a laugh. 

“It’s James Buchanan Barnes, actually—most people thank me for sparing them the mouthful. My dad was James too and that was too many in the house so Bucky stuck.” 

“Fair enough,” Steve says. “So when did you…” he gestures vaguely at Bucky’s damp, crumpled uniform, “join up?”

Bucky’s face darkens a little as he looks down at the singed sleeve of his jacket. 

“Been in about four months,” he laughs, bitterly, “thought I’d be getting ready to go over and put Hitler back in his place. Seemed like a matter of time, and I wanted to be in already but…” 

“But here you are?”

“Here I am,” Bucky agrees. 

They’re both silent for a moment, and Steve’s sure Bucky is also thinking back to the scene in Grover’s Mill—the river bank and the burning town and the striding, metallic monsters. 

“I mean, what the fuck?” Bucky says softly, after a moment. 

Steve laughs. There’s nothing else to do, unless he wants to lie down on the rough planked floor of the fishing hut and cry. Which he doesn’t. 

“Yeah,” he says. 

“I mean you—you saw what they did? They were—that was what the green meteors was about right?” 

Steve realizes that Bucky was sent out on the defensive mission with possibly even less information than he’d had himself from being in the thick of it, and he nods. 

“One landed in a field outside of town, last night.” He says, haltingly. “I went out there—thought it was just going to be a heap of space rock or something. But it was…it was them. They came out with those rays and—I don’t know how to—I guess they built the fighting machines after the rest of us that were left escaped.” 

“So do you think…” Bucky hesitates, “do you think _all_ of those meteors were carrying—carrying _that_? Jesus, there must’ve been at least two dozen we could see from here…”

Steve shakes his head. He’s been wondering the same thing, but hasn’t let himself think too hard about it. “I don’t know. All came from the same place so—so maybe.” 

“Where do you think the others were headed?” Bucky asks in a hushed voice, eyes going to the square of faded twilight in the window above them. Steve isn’t sure if he wants an answer, but Steve doesn’t have one even if he does. 

“I don’t know. Anywhere.” He says. “Where you from?”

“Brooklyn,” Bucky says, bringing his eyes back to Steve, forehead lined with worry. 

Steve gives a little startled noise that under other circumstances might have been a laugh. “No shit—me too.” 

“Yeah?” Bucky asks, smiling crookedly. “Maybe we met before. Think I’d have remembered you though.” 

“I doubt it,” Steve says wryly. Bucky, handsome and athletic, doesn’t seem much like the type of person who would have paid Steve any notice. Not as a sickly kid in school, probably not at all before today and the extraordinary circumstances that put Steve in a position to save his life. 

Bucky just shakes his head, still smiling. “Never know.” 

It’s on the tip of Steve’s tongue to say that there’s no way _he_ would’ve forgotten somebody like Bucky, but he stops himself before it tumbles out. He isn’t particularly ashamed of being _that way_ , not for many years, but it doesn’t seem like having that be exactly the third thing on the list of what Bucky knows about him would be helpful. It’s not important, anyway. Not with all they have to deal with. 

It’s not as if they’ve met in a normal way. One where it might matter if they got along, where they’d get to know each other and Steve would start dropping hairpins, seeing if Bucky responded to any of the cues. There’s no normal to be had now. 

Steve shifts uncomfortably, and the movement draws another dry little cough from him. He grunts in annoyance. 

“You need anything for that?” Bucky asks, frowning. “I mean—not that there’s much around here but—water maybe?”

“Yeah,” Steve rasps. “Couldn’t hurt.” 

“We’re right on the river. Pretty quiet out—come on.” 

Bucky heaves himself to his feet and turns to offer a hand to pull Steve up too, and together they creep from the hut and down the bank of the river. 

The water moves slower here than upstream, which Steve is grateful for. He’s glad the current was strong enough in Grover’s Mill to carry them quickly, but here he’s able to kneel at the edge of the water and cup his hands easily into it for a drink as Bucky does the same. 

When he’s had as much as he can hold, Steve takes a moment crouching there to peer into the silent woods around them. 

“How far do you think we came?” he whispers to Bucky. He doesn’t recognize the area, but then he wouldn’t. He’s only been in Grover’s Mill a year or so, and he didn’t do much exploring. 

Bucky looks around too, considering. “Not sure really. Maybe a mile. I kept us floating ’til the current died down, saw the shack and figured it’d be okay to take cover in. But I wasn’t—I didn’t keep very good track.”

Steve nods, understanding. Bucky had been conscious for the ordeal, but probably not in a much more reasonable state of mind than Steve had been for all that. 

“It was good thinking,” Steve says, eyes roving up the river where it disappears in a bend in the trees. 

“I—I was thinking we should probably get some sleep, too. Before we—well before whatever.” Bucky adds, uncertainly. 

Steve smiles at him, rising from his knees. “Yeah. Definitely.” 

They turn side by side to climb the bank again, letting themselves into the hut. Tomorrow they’ll at least have to try to come up with some sort of a way to eat, but for now the safety and peace of this hide-out is worth an empty stomach. 

“What do you—where will you go from here?” Steve asks Bucky, as they both sink again to sit on the floor of the shack. “Back to the fort?”

Bucky gives a short shake of his head, mouth twisted. “I—I know I should but—my ma and my sisters are in New York, my dad’s gone and they don’t—” he breaks off, looking at Steve anxiously. 

“I get it. Who knows what’s left at the fort anyway? It’s not like they’ll send somebody out after you for being AWOL at this point.” Steve says, understanding Bucky’s hesitance. “You _should_ go to your family.” 

Bucky lets out a little sigh, like he’d been expecting a lecture on his duty to his command headquarters. As if that matters now. 

“My…I think my whole company bit it back there. I think I’m the only one who got out.” 

“Yeah I—yeah you might be.” Steve says, without elaborating on what he’d seen from his position in front of the bridge. But he’s pretty sure Bucky’s right. 

“What about you? You have…people in New York?”

Steve swallows, an unexpected lump in his throat rising at the question. “No. Not anymore.” 

“Oh.” Bucky says, intuiting something from Steve’s tone. “Sorry.” 

“I guess…well I guess maybe it’s easier, now. To be that way.” 

Bucky gazes at him, chewing on his bottom lip for a moment. “Do you—we could travel together, if you want. Maybe they’re organizing better, in New York. Makes sense maybe, for you to come too?”

Steve’s eyes flick to Bucky’s face, and then away. “I uh—yeah. Yeah I think that’d be good.”

Bucky smiles. “Good.” 

They sit for a few minutes in silence then, with only the soft animal noises of the forest and the tumble of water in the river disturbing it. 

But after some time Steve notices that Bucky is shivering a bit in the descending chill of the night. October has been kind this year, but it’s still plunging toward winter same as it ever does in this part of the country. 

Without stopping to think about it Steve reaches out and grasps a corner of Bucky’s sleeve, finding the thick fabric still damp and extremely cold. His own coat, which he’d been wearing when they’d taken the plunge into the river, appears to be hanging from a hook on the wall and is dripping sluggishly as well—but at least his pants and button-down are dried out. 

“Bucky, you’re all wet still! You must be freezing.” 

“S’nothing,” Bucky says, with a nonchalant shrug—but the statement and gesture are belied by a slight chatter to his teeth as he says it. 

Steve frowns, making a decision. 

“Come’ere,” he says, lifting up the heavy wool blanket Bucky had tucked around him earlier. 

“I—I can’t,” Bucky says, “You need it more than me.” 

“I’m suggesting we _share_ , you dope. Either one of us gets sick it’s gonna be a pain for the other. And you’re not gonna dry in the cold air like that. Come on,” he cajoles, shifting the blanket under himself so Bucky can crawl over and rest on it too. 

He does, looking reluctant. But he gives a grateful sigh as he slumps down, wrapping half of it over himself and curling up. The thing is big enough for them both to lay on top of it, protected from the cold seeping up from the floorboards, and still each have a leaf of it to wrap over himself. 

“Better take our shoes off,” Steve says, leaning forward to unlace his own. “Don’t want to get trench foot bumming around New Jersey.” 

Bucky doesn’t respond, and Steve looks over to see his eyes closed and his mouth already slightly parted in sleep, breathing steadily. Steve smiles, shaking his head. He wonders if Bucky hadn’t let himself rest at all while he waited for Steve to come around. With all the adrenaline of the fight and the effort of their escape he must be exhausted. 

Steve scoots forward and carefully undoes the laces of Bucky’s combat boots, peeling them off and hanging both of their socks gently over the edge of a workbench to dry. Then he crawls back onto his half of the blanket, wrapping the top half as tight around himself as he can manage. 

Bucky’s low, rhythmic breathing is a soothing sound in his ear, reminding him that for the first time in a long while he isn’t alone.


	4. A Journey Undertaken

“I’m serious Steve, I’m getting pretty damn close to risking poisonous berry time here,” Bucky grumbles as they shove their way through yet another thicket of brambles alongside the river. 

“You go ahead if you find some, personally I don’t think even poisonous ones are growing much this time of year,” Steve shoots back.

“Ah, fuck,” Bucky responds, eloquently. 

They’d woken with the morning light, Steve at least having slept like a rock. He thinks Bucky must’ve too because he woke up warmer than he had any right to be in the un-insulated hut to Bucky pressed up against his back, on arm draped over his waist. Bucky was a slow waker though, so by the time he was fully conscious Steve had already moved away. He’s not sure Bucky was aware of it at all. 

There hadn’t been much to do at that point besides start moving—they’d decided they would follow the river, which eventually should drop them in the next town up. Once there they’ll be on recognizable ground again, and can take actual road the rest of the way to New York. They both hope maybe even to find a car—it will be some long days on foot otherwise. 

Steve doesn’t pray much anymore, not since his mom passed. But he does send up a small, desperate plea on behalf of his lungs that he can make it through without another incident like yesterday. His asthma and fevers and the fatigue that had kept him homebound as a child have mostly faded in his adulthood, though he’s still prone to colds, but he knows that whatever is ahead of them is going to test his limits much more strenuously than they’ve been tested before. And he doesn’t want to give Bucky a reason to be sorry that he got saddled with him. 

They’d decided to bring the blanket with them, unsure of what they’d be faced with ahead, but had opted after some discussion not to bother with fishing gear. Both of them, having grown up in Brooklyn, realized they’d have little or no use for the stuff. Even if they managed to work out how to catch something, starting a fire or figuring out how to turn the fish into something edible would be a whole other challenge. 

Steve’s starting to rethink it now, though, as the sun nears its zenith overhead and they still have yet to see any sign of a populated area. 

He’s just beginning to rethink his stance on foraging—maybe they ought to start keeping an eye out and take a risk on something edible looking, if only because they’ll be running out of energy to keep moving soon—when Bucky halts abruptly, causing Steve almost to crash into him. 

“Thank god,” Bucky says, in a low voice, looking over his shoulder, “look.”

Steve leans around Bucky to see what he’s pointing at, and breathes his own sigh of relief. Ahead of them on the other side of this thicket the river widens and the banks open up, and Steve can see a bridge that means human life must not be too far. 

“Let’s stay off the road, ’til we see what we’re dealing with,” Steve says just above a whisper. 

Bucky nods his wordless agreement, pushing ahead again through the underbrush with a renewed deliberation, staying as silent as possible. 

They climb the bank once they reach the pylons of the bridge, edging into the trees alongside the road. Steve thinks it’s entirely likely that this stretch of back road is always this empty, but it still feels eerie nonetheless. 

It’s not far before they see the start of a township rising ahead of them, a village maybe even smaller than Grover’s Mill with no buildings taller than two stories. 

Steve’s heart sinks when they get close enough to see that the steeple of the small white wooden church building is blackened and smoking from one side of the tower. 

“They’ve already been here,” Bucky says quietly. 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. 

Soon the copse of trees they’ve been working their way through ends, opening up into the village. They pause for a moment, listening. There’s no sound coming from the town, Martian or otherwise, and they exchange worried glances. 

Finally, Steve shrugs. “I think we’d know if they’re still around. Seems like they’ve probably moved on—the fire’s all burnt out already.” 

Bucky bites his lip, then nods decisively. “No help for it I guess.” 

They step out onto the road, and make their way into the center of town. 

It seems to be almost entirely deserted. Steve imagines the scene that faced it was probably the same as in Grover’s Mill. Anyone who wasn’t disintegrated by the heat ray having fled. 

Eventually they come upon the general store on the main street, and Bucky gives one anxious glance around before wrapping his arm in a corner of the blanket and breaking one of the panes of glass in the front window so that they can climb in. Steve flinches at the sound, so apocalyptic in the otherwise silent street, but nothing appears to challenge them. 

He climbs in through the broken window after Bucky, relieved to be in out of the open. 

Bucky tosses him an apple from a stand, crunching into one himself as he moves down the aisle. 

“What do you think? We should find a sack maybe, to take some supplies with us…” 

Steve isn’t listening, the tiredness hitting his bones suddenly enough that he has to sink to the floor right in place and put his head between his knees. 

“Steve?” Bucky asks, concern in his voice, “you okay?”

Truthfully, he’s feeling pretty faint, his vision greying for a moment as he lifts his head. 

“I’m okay just—just needed to sit for a minute.” 

Bucky’s face softens as he returns down the aisle and sits next to Steve. “I know. You gotta eat something though, we’re both probably gonna pass out soon if we don’t. Eat that apple, I’ll figure out what else is here—then we can both rest a bit ’til it’s cooler okay?”

Steve nods shakily, lifting the apple to take a bite. His fingers feel numb, but he manages to eat most of it. Bucky vanishes again into the depths of the store and returns with a loaf of bread and sliced ham for sandwiches that he cajoles Steve into eating as well. Steve is blinking rapidly, his eyes wanting to close badly, and Bucky slings the blanket around both of their shoulders. Together they slump into the shadowy corner tucked behind the produce, out of sight of the window, and fall into a restless sleep. 

He awakes, he’s not sure how much later, to the jarring sound of a person shouting. Steve jerks upright with a start, grasping out automatically for Bucky, but finding him gone. 

“Bucky?” He calls, anxiously in a low voice, “Bucky!” 

“Shh, I’m here,” Bucky whispers, scrambling around the end of a set of shelves hurriedly. “I was just packing up some things and—”

The raised voice calls out again, and this time Steve is conscious enough to realize that it’s coming from out on the street. Both of them rise together in a half crouch to peer out over the edge of the window. 

There’s a man, staggering in the middle of the road and swaying crazily as he goes, voice raised—though Steve can’t make out any of what he’s saying. He looks more than half-mad. 

“Should we—?” Bucky starts to ask with a frown. But Steve squints at the figure, suddenly recognizing the man. 

“Ogilvy!” he exclaims, standing up the rest of the way and making toward the smashed window. “It’s Dr. Ogilvy, the astronomy professor from Princeton—I thought for certain he’d died, but he might know—something!”

“Steve, wait—” Bucky calls after him, but Steve is already halfway out the window toward the man in the street, so Bucky follows. 

“Dr. Ogilvy,” Steve calls to him, approaching the man, who turns wild, unrecognizing eyes to Steve and jerks back at the sound of his name. Steve slows his approach, holding up his hands soothingly. “Dr. Ogilvy, it’s Steve, Steve Rogers from the _Tribune_ —are you—are you alright?”

It’s a nonsense question, Steve knows. None of them is _alright_ , but he supposed he means it comparatively. 

Ogilvy raises shaking hands to his head, tugging at his frizzy gray hair, which stands out in tufts from his skull. His clothes are covered in soot, and there appears to be a burn down one of his arms. 

“This can’t happen,” he says, his voice still raised harshly in the otherwise quiet street, “they shouldn’t be—the chances are a million to one—a million to _one_ —”

“I know, I know professor but you can’t—did you come from Grover’s?” 

The man doesn’t answer, just sways again and takes a few more stumbling steps up the street. 

“The meteors—they’ve all landed now—Paris, London, Chicago, New York—”

“New York?” Bucky cuts him off, sharply. Ogilvy’s eyes focus just slightly, landing on Bcky and nodding. 

“My calculations—they’ll be there, now—they’ll be _everywhere_ —”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Bucky breathes, face twisting. 

“Ogilvy, you can’t—where are you going?” Steve asks, again stepping forward to grasp the man’s arm, but he shies away from the contact. When he speaks again it’s in a shout. 

“Going?” he cries, “there’s nowhere to go! They can’t be stopped!” 

“Steve,” Bucky says, warningly, “I don’t think we can—he’s out of his mind…”

Steve agrees with the diagnosis, but his gut twists at the thought of leaving him here, probably to perish from dehydration. 

“We should still—maybe we can—”

He’s not sure what he’s going to suggest, there’s no way they can take charge of him and still get to New York before—before whatever happens there is finished. But he still feels like they ought to try something…

Ogilvy bursts into a torrent of manic, cackling laughter, whirling now on the pair of them. 

“The odds, oh the odds! The odds of them coming—staggering—the odds of all our deaths—inevitable! We were fools, all of us!” 

At that pronouncement, he turns, with more speed than Steve would have guessed him capable of, and begins to run down the empty village street—laughter still echoing off the buildings and the cobblestone as he zigzags away. 

“Should we…?” Steve begins. 

Bucky lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, turning him away. “Steve, I don’t think—I don’t think there’s anything we can do for him now. What could we, even if we wanted to try?”

Steve knows he’s right, but it makes him feel awful anyway, a wringing guilt clenching around his gut. He feels his expression crumple as the weight of it lands on him. It’s not just Ogilvy—what can they do for anyone, now? Besides continue on their way? 

“I know. I know it’s not—I don’t like it either,” Bucky says, settling a grounding, comforting hand on the back of Steve’s neck as he fights down the feeling. 

Steve clears his throat, squaring his shoulders. “We’ve got to get to New York. Get to your family—if there’s anything we can do it’s gotta be there.” 

Bucky looks down at Steve’s face with a sad smile, giving his neck a final squeeze. 

“I’m beginning to suspect that you are a good person, Steve Rogers.” He says, steering Steve back toward the general store. “That’s a nice thing to find…at the end of the world.” 

 

After a bit of scrounging, Bucky manages to find a knapsack which they pack full of as many easy foods as they can, unsure how far it will be to the next town, or if anything will be left of it there to forage in. 

They hike out of town right through the center, figuring if nothing was drawn by Ogilvy’s shouting it must be well and truly deserted. They don’t see any sign of the man again. 

It’s much easier going on the road than it was along the river bank, and Steve is deeply relieved to find that his body isn’t bothering him too much over the effort. His nap and meal at the general store seemed to give him what he needed for a second wind—the confrontation with Ogilvy and the desperate sense of urgency in their trek providing the rest. 

“Tell me about your family,” Steve says, after an hour or two of focused walking. 

Bucky hasn’t said anything more about Ogilvy’s pronouncement on New York, or the rest. But Steve, who hasn’t quite been able to help himself from shooting sideways glances at the other man’s profile as often as he can get away with it, can tell from the crease in his brow that he’s worried. Once or twice though, when he turned and caught Steve looking, the look had smoothed away immediately, replaced with a reassuring smile. Steve wonders where that habit comes from—pretending to be fine for the sake of his company, even when he has a more than reasonable right to be unhappy. It’s the kind of thing perfected over long practice, Steve doesn’t think Bucky even realizes he’s doing it.

Bucky gives a soft chuckle, tucking his thumbs under the straps of the knapsack. 

“Hmm. Well, I got four sisters and my ma—so that probably tells you a lot about what our place was like growing up.” 

“Younger than you?” 

Bucky nods. “Yeah, oldest kid, only boy. Then my dad passed away a couple years ago so…well, I always wanted to take care of ’em I guess. Not that my ma couldn’t handle it on her own—she’s scarier than my first drill sergeant. Makes the best brisket you’ve ever tasted. Anyway she had to be scarier than a drill sergeant, wrangling my sisters ‘n’ me…think it was a lot more like lion taming.” 

“And your sisters? Still at home?” 

“Three of ’em. Rebecca’s the next after me, she got married end of last year. She’s out in California now. Then there’s Alice, she’s seventeen, wants to be a nurse like my ma but only because a girl can’t be a prizefighter. Jane’s fourteen, real quiet kid, not sure how she happened actually. Might be adopted. And Mary’s ten, practically feral. Baby of the family ya know, does whatever she wants.” 

Steve smiles at the familiar affection in Bucky’s voice, the love under the exasperation. 

“They sound great.” 

Bucky’s fond expression falters a little, and Steve sees his jaw clench. “Yeah. They are.” 

Steve hesitates. “I—you can be worried, you know. You don’t have to pretend not to be for me. Hell I’m worried, and I’m just the stray you picked up.” 

Bucky chews his bottom lip, casting Steve a sideways glance from under his eyelashes, measuringly. Then his mouth twists into a wry smile. “Thanks.” He says, simply. 

They walk a few more paces in silence, and then Bucky reaches out an arm, slinging it around Steve’s neck in a comfortable, easy gesture that makes Steve’s heart trip over a beat. 

“You’re no stray either, pal.” 

“Thanks,” Steve mumbles, unconvinced. 

Bucky shoves him away, and Steve staggers a couple steps, laughing with surprise. “Hey! Jerk!” 

Bucky’s grinning, and spreads his hands innocently. “Next time just take the compliment, punk.” 

Steve finds himself grinning back, despite himself. “‘You aren’t a stray’ isn’t exactly the height of compliments—jeez I’d hate to see how you fare with the dames.”

“Hah,” Bucky scoffs. “What? You fishing for something better? Want me to lay some of my good lines on you?” 

Steve keeps his expression the same, though he feels his cheeks flame up a bit at the unexpected turn to the conversation. _Whoops_. 

“Nah, I don’t think I can handle the second hand embarrassment if I had to be the one to tell you your moves aren’t any good and it turns out they’ve all been humoring you.” He says, aiming for something lightly teasing— _not flirting_. 

Bucky raises a hand to his chest in mock outrage. “Stevie, you saying you don’t think anybody liked me for my brains after all? I’m shocked, shocked!” 

Steve chuckles. “Well, into every life some rain must fall I guess. Yours is just living with the knowledge that you’re just a pretty face.” He waves a hand vaguely at the empty road around them, “Plus—you know—the whole alien invasion thing. That’s not so great either.” 

“Right, that. Guess that’s a bit of a downpour for all of us.” 

“Yeah,” Steve sighs, remembering why it is that he’s walking along a New Jersey back road with this man in the first place, and letting the laughter lines fall from his face again. 

Up ahead they see a road sign for the next town, six miles ahead. 

“Probably be ready for a rest by then, huh?” Bucky says, pointing at it. “Maybe we’ll get lucky this time, find a car.” 

Steve agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love your comments--let me know what you're thinking :)


	5. Invaders and Conquerors

It only takes them the space of those six miles to discard altogether the idea of the car. 

For one, they _do_ begin to see some—the street leading into the town, a good bit bigger than the last, is littered with them—and every single vehicle shows signs of having come up against the Martians. Not _all_ of them are entirely melted wrecks, but enough are. Others were clearly abandoned in an effort to avoid that exact fate. Some are smashed in from the top, and Steve can picture too well what one of the huge metal feet of the fighting machines would look like stepping down on the top of it. 

Even if they find an undamaged one it seems that being in a vehicle makes a much more appealing target for the Martians—something best avoided at all costs, they decide. 

There’s more evidence of alien destruction in this town, but there are more people too, at last. All of them bear the same lost expression. Nobody is much interested in interacting. Steve and Bucky camp out for the night in the kitchen of a half burnt-out house, taking the chance to wash up and fill their canteens before moving on quickly in the morning. 

It’s almost worse, this town haunted by the living, than it had been in the entirely deserted village before. 

Steve stands in the tidy garden of the little house, waiting for Bucky. The grass is clipped perfectly level, silvered by early morning frost as the sun works its way over the trees. But as Steve gazes down, absently, he notices that threaded in amongst the green is a dark, bloody red. His eyes follow the tendrils of it, down the slope of the lawn, and notices in the growing light that at the edge of the woods the red has actually taken over entirely. Some kind of plant, he thinks. It looks almost like algae, spiky and creeping up to choke the trunks of trees, dripping down from the branches. It’s odd—he’s never seen anything like it before. Maybe something that doesn’t grow in the area around Grover’s Mill, but that’s strange too…

“Alright, let’s get marching,” Bucky says, coming up behind him. 

Steve glances at him, then does a quick, probably obvious double-take. Bucky had seemingly in the last moments in the house decided to root around in the closets, because his burnt green wool uniform is gone. In its stead is a pair of neatly pressed grey trousers, a light blue collared shirt, and suspenders. Bucky blushes a little at Steve’s stare, shrugging into a camel colored coat over the top of it. 

“I uh—felt like that uniform was a little conspicuous. Didn’t feel right in it.” He looks up at Steve, anxiously, “You think it’s okay right? To—to take these things? I wouldn’t only—”

Steve swallows, then nods, shoving down the embarrassingly strong involuntary reaction he’s having to the sight of Bucky in civilian clothes. He’s also shaved the scruffy stubble that had started to shadow his face, reminding Steve forcefully and unhelpfully about that jawline. 

“I think it’s alright—of course it is. Good thinking.” 

Bucky’s face relaxes, and he plucks the knapsack from Steve’s hand, slinging it over his shoulder. “Oh. Good.” 

As they continue on, finding themselves now on larger roads and in more populated areas, the stream of other people also trekking on foot also increases steadily. All of them seem to be moving in the opposite direction, back into the countryside from which Steve and Bucky have come. Once in a while Steve asks someone where they’re coming from—answered usually with the names of towns and cities further up. Grim faced men and women, tired children, all carrying boxes and bags of whatever was precious enough for them to grab before fleeing their homes. Invariably each of them says something along the lines of “I wouldn’t go that way if I were you.” But looking at each of them, clutching their most prized worldly possessions to them, Steve knows that the only thing of value to Bucky is in New York. And Steve has nowhere else to go. 

He notices too that the red weed which he’d first seen threading the edges of the woods in that charred town is taking over the landscape all around them. It creeps up waterways, choking the ditches beside the road, fingers of scarlet inexorably grasping all the green around them in its fist. If he thought at first that it was something native to the land here, he thinks better of it now. It’s _theirs_ ; it’s turning the earth slowly the color that gives Mars its bloody appearance in the sky—invading and conquering as surely as the heat rays and metal machines. 

It’s inevitable, of course, after the relative peace—if couched in a strange desolation—that they eventually come again upon the source of all the destruction. 

They’re trudging wearily through yet another half-ruined town, Steve’s body aching with the efforts of the past days. He’s abandoned any attempt at conversation at this point in the day, occupied merely with the process of setting one sore foot in front of another, and again, and again. His vision has narrowed to a point on the dark asphalt just in front of his feet. 

So he gives a startled yelp when Bucky jerks his arm, yanking him sideways into the covered doorway of a shuttered bank. Bucky grips an arm around his chest, pulling Steve back against him, and clapping a hand over Steve’s mouth to stop him from making any more noise. 

“Look,” he breathes into Steve’s ear, causing a shiver to run down his spine. Bucky’s body is firm and solid at his back, his breath warm on his neck. 

But then Steve looks where Bucky’s indicated, and a different kind of shiver runs through him—cold fear dripping down the back of his throat. 

Behind the row of storefronts, weaving in between shops with jerky, mechanical movements is a tall, gleaming Martian. Steve sucks in a gasp between Bucky’s fingers, and Bucky eases the hand away from Steve’s mouth to rest on his shoulder, still clasping him back into the shadow of the doorway against him. 

The creature is moving slowly, eerily silent for its massive size. It steps out from between two buildings, onto the street a few blocks up from where they hide. The dome atop it vacillates, acting like a head, and it appears to be searching for something. Steve’s entire body is rigid, waiting for whatever horrible thing it’s preparing for. 

Another machine steps out onto the road beside it—and this one is different, squat and spiderlike. Instead of the towering legs and pod-like dome, this one sports a wide sort of basket on the top. Steve doesn’t want to see what the dark shapes are that fill the metal. But he’s fairly certain he already knows. 

The first machine, the fighting machine, positions itself above a building, stretching out silver, jointed arms and smashing the roof off of it, reaching in and groping around the building. Slowly it pulls back, and tosses a limp, human form into the receptacle of its companion. 

Bucky twitches convulsively behind him, tightening his grip. 

They’re collecting bodies. 

In the distance, somewhere further up the road, comes that wet shriek. The one the fighting machines had called out to each other in celebration as they’d crashed through the destruction of Grover’s Mill. The Martian in the street near them pauses its collection, raising up to answer with its own heart-stopping cry. 

Then it stalks forward, on to the next building. 

“When it goes for the roof, we’ve gotta make a break for it,” Bucky whispers, shakily into Steve’s ear. “Maybe the noise’ll cover us—it’s coming this way—”

Steve nods, heart pounding erratically. 

“We just passed an alley, we can slip up that way,” Bucky adds. 

The machine reaches for the windows of the building—a pretty, brightly painted milliner’s shop—smashing its arms through the top windows of the place and lifting, dragging the roof off with a sickening crunch. 

Bucky grabs Steve’s hand as soon as the Martian’s metal limbs break the windows, tugging him out of the doorway and scurrying in a crouched run back the way they’d come. It’s the most Steve can do to keep his feet under him. 

He expects the whine of the ghostly ray at any moment, or to be snatched up and flung into that savage basket. His heart races as if it knows these might be its final beats, and it wants to squeeze as many of them in as it can. 

Bucky yanks him by the hand around the mouth of the alley, into something at least a little more sheltered, and they both rise from their hunched position to run flat out. 

They’re weaving through alleys, darting glances backward to check on the location of the ugly, shining dome of the spire over the roofs behind them, when Steve skids to a halt, pulling Bucky’s arm with a jerk. 

Ahead of them, off to the right, another tripod rises. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve hisses, as they press against the wall of the alley. 

Bucky lets out a sharp breath, his eyes going wide. But he clenches his jaw, tightening his grip on Steve’s hand. “This way,” he says. 

Steve follows. He hopes Bucky has some kind of plan, because his mind has gone almost utterly blank with the terror. 

Bucky pulls him up the street, taking a quick left away from the new fighting machine in their path, and onto a street that looks to be homes rather than shops. Bucky’s head is swiveling as they rush past townhouses and Victorians, and Steve isn’t sure what he’s looking for. But then he stops abruptly, pulling Steve down along the side of a tall, stately home. 

“Here,” he whispers as they reach the back end of the place—and Steve finally sees what he must have been looking for. 

It’s a dark, covered set of stairs leading down into a basement. Bucky waves his hand at Steve, urging him down them. “Go!” he says, and Steve obeys, almost falling down the small concrete flight of steps. 

Steve tries the handle of the door—it’s locked. Bucky tumbles down behind him, staggering a little and knocking Steve forward. 

“It’s—”

“Move over,” Bucky says. 

Bucky squares his shoulders, closing his eyes and taking in a deep breath. Steve braces, knowing that whatever noise comes from Bucky kicking in the door could mean the balance of this escape being successful and leading the Martian machine straight to them. He feels Bucky shift back, preparing—Steve’s eyes fly open, and he yanks Bucky backwards by the handle of the backpack, throwing off his momentum and making him stumble. 

“Wait!” Steve whispers, as Bucky turns him a look of confusion. 

Steve moves around him, standing on tiptoe and groping over the frame of the door, begging silently that just maybe—

“Aha!” he draws his hand back, fingers clutching a dusty, rusted key. Bucky sags in relief, nodding frantically. 

Steve unlocks the door, and they both tumble forward into the dark space, shutting it behind them and falling against it—Steve flicking the deadbolt and chain across it hastily, as if that would really make a different faced with one of the fighting machines. 

They lean side by side, slumped back against the door, both of them panting raggedly. Bucky looks over at him, face creased as the fear that he’d pushed aside during their flight through the streets catches up to him. 

“That was—good thinking,” he pants. 

“You too,” Steve whispers back, fervently. He’s certain that without Bucky he would’ve frozen in the door to the bank, maybe with some small chance that the things would pass by him—but all too likely becoming another broken, doll-like figure in the heap of bodies in the terrible, metal basket. 

It could still very well come to that, he thinks. 

Wordlessly, they both sink to sit on the floor of the basement, backs still pressed to the door. Bucky drops his head to his knees with a few shuddering, unsteady breaths. Steve is suddenly taken by the urge to put his hand on Bucky’s neck, to stroke through the silky strands of chestnut hair at his nape, to say something soothing. But he doesn’t. Of all the times and all the places, this isn’t the one where it’s possible. 

Steve’s used to that feeling. Of looking at any number of the boys he’s been drawn to before (outside of meeting in a place where they all know the score) and knowing it isn’t an option. This moment just also happens to include the high possibility of imminent death at the hands of other-worldly invaders. But pushing the urge away works more or less the same.

Instead he turns his eyes, adjusting now to the dim light, into the space they occupy. 

He can make out the hulking shapes of some furniture, and boxes maybe, shoved up against the walls. The basement may have been outfitted to serve as a living space at one point—there’s a door in one corner that appears to lead to a small water closet—but it hasn’t been used that way any time recently. It looks like it must mainly serve as storage for the main house now. 

A rumbling, crashing boom sounds above them, shaking the door at their back, and Steve and Bucky both go still, locking eyes with each other. 

The Martians have made their destructive way to the street. 

There’s nothing to do but wait in tense, agonized silence as the thundering moves closer and closer—it’s all too easy to picture each of the houses above them collapsing, being searched with those probing, metal arms…

A scrape and a thud sound directly above them. Bucky snatches out his hand and wraps his fingers around Steve’s, white-knuckled. 

Another shudder shakes the door and the very walls around them, the foundations in which they are crouching groaning. The wood of the house above splinters and cracks, and what little light there was in the basement disappears as pieces of debris fall to cover the small slit windows at the top of the wall. 

The creature is close enough now that they can hear the clicking of its metal limbs, scraping along the floor above them. Neither one dares to breathe. A sharp bang at the door makes both of them jump, falling forward—but nothing follows it. Probably just more rubble from the demolition of the house above. 

And then the sounds stop. 

For a long, awful moment Steve can’t hear anything but Bucky’s uncontrolled, jagged breathing. 

The sounds resume—but further off now. The machine has moved on to the next house up the street. 

Steve looks at Bucky, who opens his mouth wordlessly several times. Steve shakes his head. 

Eventually, the sound recedes altogether—the thing making its dogged way through town out of the range where Steve can hear it. 

“Are we—?” Steve begins, unsure of what he’s asking. 

“Safe,” Bucky supplies, sounding just as incredulous. “I think it—it didn’t find us. We’re—I think we’re safe.” 

Slowly, Bucky unclenches the hand gripped around Steve’s, and Steve flexes his stiff fingers to return the blood flow. Bucky stands unsteadily, creeping over to climb on top of a chair and peer out of the small, clouded window. 

“The whole house came down around us,” he says in a low voice. “We’ll have to dig our way out, I think—eventually.” 

“They’ll—they’ll move on? Won’t they?” Steve asks, as if Bucky knows any more than he does. His head is swimming with spent adrenaline. 

“I…guess they will. When there’s nothing left here they want. Best to stay put awhile though—don’t you think? To be safe?” 

Steve nods in relieved agreement. He’s anxious to get to New York, and Bucky has even more reason than him to feel the urgency. But he isn’t ready to run another gauntlet like that again, not right away. If Bucky is willing to stay where they are until the Martians move on, he will gratefully concur. 

Bucky climbs down off the chair, moving to the corner of the basement. Steve hears the tap turn, and the soft sound of water running. Bucky appears in the doorway again, looking ten years older than he had when they’d set out this morning. 

“Water still runs—that means we can stick it out a few days, if we have to. But they’re moving pretty fast.” 

“I don’t—” Steve starts hoarsely, then clears his throat, “I don’t think they’ll spend too much more time once they’ve—once they’ve finished with the town.” 

“Yeah.” 

Bucky shrugs off the knapsack, dropping it heavily to the floor, tossing his coat after it. He raises his hands, running them through his hair. 

“You hungry?” he asks Steve, quietly, nudging the backpack with his toe. 

“No,” Steve answers. “Don’t think I’ll know up from down enough to eat for a while yet. Maybe ever.” 

“Me too.” Bucky looks around in the dark room, squinting at the furniture piled about. He moves to one wall of stacked things, and starts scraping around with something Steve can’t quite make out from where he still sits on the floor. 

“ _Mmph_ ,” Bucky grunts, tugging on a broad shape. “Come’ere and help me.” 

“Oh—right,” Steve offers, after a blank moment. The thoughts are still taking an extra moment to swim through the fuzz around him. He pushes himself standing on knees that feel like they’ve been welded in place. 

The big shape is a mattress, swathed up in white cloth to protect it from the dust. Steve joins Bucky on one end of it, tugging it free from behind the chest of drawers pinning it to the wall. They slide it loose, and Steve lets go as Bucky hauls it the rest of the way and lets it flop to the ground. 

Bucky looks up at Steve and shrugs, yanking the dust cloth off of it. “Might as well, right?”

Steve lets out a sigh, feeling the dregs of taut tension bleed away from him, leaving on a bone-deep weariness. “Might as well.” 

He lets himself crash down, sprawling across half of it and already feeling his eyes and jellied muscles tugging at him. Something soft and heavy lands over his back, and he recognizes the slightly musty smell of the wool blanket from the fishing hut, their faithful companion on this trip. Steve curls up facing outward, tugging it around him. The mattress sinks with Bucky’s weight beside him as he fusses with the other side of the blanket. 

Bucky scoots backward, so that his back is tucked up directly against the full length of Steve’s, curled facing the other direction. 

“You mind?” he mumbles. 

“Mm-mm,” Steve manages. 

He figures they both need the comfort of the contact.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More mutual saving and now trapped in a basement. Hmm, what are we to do?
> 
> Here's a [rebloggable tumblr](http://odette-and-odile.tumblr.com/post/179291019748/in-grovers-mill-stevexbucky-mature) version if you like and want to give it a share!


	6. Port in the Storm

It’s hard to tell how much time is passing, in the perpetual dimness of the basement. Impossible to say how long they spend in restless sleep, when they eat, how the hours are moving above them. 

Steve feels as though they’ve probably passed through the night, maybe even part of another day. But the only barometer he really has is his stomach, and that isn’t much help—his appetite as topsy turvy as everything else. 

They explore the basement a little, in small quiet movements, looking for anything that might be useful (they don’t find anything). But mostly they rest, they talk, and they wait. 

“Wanna know something funny?” Bucky says, after one of their sporadic meals of beef jerky and the remaining apples from their pack as they lie stretched out on top of their makeshift bed. 

“Sure, tell me something funny.” 

Bucky elbows him, and Steve laughs. 

“Punk,” Bucky remarks, not sounding too put out. “I was gonna say—I always loved all that space stuff. You know, went to the Stark Expo every year—used to dream about maybe one day how we’d send people into space. Hoped maybe I’d get to see that—can you imagine? All the stars and—anyway. It’s strange to think now. What’s actually up there, looking down at us the whole time.” 

“Maybe…maybe it’s not just them,” Steve begins, slowly, the thought only half-formed. “Maybe if they’re out there, there’s more than that and—and maybe it isn’t all so—so bad.” 

“That’s a nice thought. Too bad we probably aren’t gonna see it now.” 

“Yeah…that’s a less nice thought, Buck. Thanks.” Steve says, dripping sarcasm. 

“You’re very welcome, just doing what I can here.” 

“Sort of missing when you were just singing to yourself—it was off-key but it was a little peppier, know what I’m saying?” 

“I was _not_ singing to myself!” 

Steve lets out a dubious little hum of disagreement, corners of his mouth quirking up in a teasing smile that Bucky probably can’t even see from where he’s lying. “You tell yourself that. But I happen to know you’re a big Gershwin fan, pal, and that’s all I’ll say about that.” 

Bucky doesn’t seem to have a comeback for that. 

They drift, several more hazy hours at least. Long enough that they start to speculate about whether it might be safe to move. 

But no sooner have they broached the subject than the sound of striding machines clangs again overhead, and they spend another breathless hour crouched against the wall waiting to see if they’ll be discovered. They aren’t, but it puts the possibility of moving on right away off the table again for the time being. 

After another little while in fragile silence, Bucky decides he’s going to risk running the tap long enough to wash. Steve can’t blame him—neither has had a proper chance to clean up since their dunking in the river, minus a quick splash of water here and there at some of their temporary hideouts. Steve busies himself while Bucky’s in the bathroom by laying out the rest of their remaining food supply, trying to divvy it up as best he can in case they need to make it several days before they can scrounge again. 

His lips are pressed tight in thought as he surveys what they’ve got left, wondering if Bucky will accept it if Steve tries to give him bigger portions. Steve has a feeling Bucky won’t like it—but it’s only fair, he reasons. Steve’s smaller, he doesn’t need as much. He’s running over the argument in his mind, preparing for what Bucky will say when the door creaks open again behind him and Bucky returns in a puff of fresh soap smell. 

Steve looks over his shoulder, stopping a small noise of alarm that threatens to escape him. Bucky’s returned in just his shorts and a thin, sleeveless undershirt, his shirt and trousers draped over his arm. 

Bucky shrugs, apparently not correctly interpreting the look— _thank god_ —and hangs the clothes over a weathered looking coat rack. 

“Figured I’d wash them as well while I was at it,” he says, “might not get another chance for a while.”

“Y—yeah. Makes sense,” Steve says. 

“You wanna have at it? Even managed to get a little bit of warm out of there—the boiler in this place must be built like a fucking tank.”

Steve clears his throat. “Thanks I…will.” 

It’s a good idea, actually, to remove himself for a moment to collect his thoughts. He’s a goddamn adult, perfectly capable of being confronted by a (very—much _too_ ) handsome man in his drawers without losing his shit. It just sorta took him by surprise. Bucky’s hair is slicked back and glistening from his wash, and he gives Steve an odd look as Steve scurries past him into the tiny bathroom. 

He doesn’t even need to test the stoutness of the boiler. Cold water seems like a better idea at the moment. 

He climbs into the little claw-footed tub and runs the tap, splashing around a bit in the bracing chill of it. It’s good, distracting—and it is a relief to scrub away the grime of the past few days of travel. After he’s washed himself, he even rethinks forgoing a clothes wash. Giving his shirt a good sniff Steve decides that he’s absolutely adult enough to handle being stripped to his underthings for a few hours without being too tempted by the situation if it means rinsing this stuff before he has to wear it again. 

All in all, Steve feels settled again and able to handle the breadth of Bucky’s shoulders and taper of his waist without letting it surprise him into making the moment awkward. Bucky at this moment is first and foremost the one person Steve finds he cares too much about to lose—and he may not be able to control their odds against the strength and fearful weapons of the Martians, but he can control himself. 

Steve pads back out of the bathroom, dripping clothes over his arm, moving to hang them on the same coat rack Bucky had located to dry his. 

Bucky is lounging on an armchair—one Steve hadn’t noticed before, Bucky must have done more exploring while he washed up. He glances up at Steve as he turns, but doesn’t say anything, just gives a small, sort of closed off smile. Steve wonders if it’s too late not to introduce an element of awkwardness between them, if the look on his face at Bucky’s state of undress had already said it all. He sighs, moving into the other corner of the room. 

It feels odd, in this borrowed haven, to go through the belongings stored down here—even if the destruction of the house above tells him as much as he needs to know about the state of their owners. But maybe Bucky’s got the right approach, Steve thinks. You never know what might be useful. He decides he might as well keep his brain and hands occupied with some kind of task—he’s too wound up to doze anymore—so he sets himself to sorting through the drawers and cubbies of a heavy wooden desk set against the far wall. 

The search may begin under the pretext of finding something of use, but Steve soon becomes absorbed in the mundanity of the yellowed letters, old bills, shopping lists, discarded calling cards and the rest cluttering the desk. The remnants of a familiar kind of life, ordered and thoughtless, that the occupants of this home carried on before…before all this. Steve finds himself looking at their dry-cleaning bills, hoping that they fled, and weren’t trapped in the wreckage awaiting the fate of those caught out by the Martians. 

He’s so absorbed, in fact, that he doesn’t hear Bucky move until he speaks directly beside his shoulder. 

“You ignoring me, Stevie?” Bucky asks. 

His voice is husky, and it’s that as much as the surprise of him sneaking up that sends Steve’s heart skittering violently against his ribcage. 

Steve swallows. “Why would I?” He asks, keeping his tone level. Still, he doesn’t turn from the desk.

“Not sure,” Bucky says, stepping even closer into Steve’s space, close enough that Steve can feel Bucky’s body heat radiating against his back. 

Bucky reaches out and places light fingers on Steve’s shoulder, making him shiver, then down his arm to wrap them around Steve’s wrist. He takes the last step toward Steve, pressing against Steve’s back, and Steve can barely keep up—doesn’t believe the evidence of Bucky’s actions about what exactly might be happening here—when Bucky says, 

“You can touch me, if you want to, Steve. Way you look at me, seems like you do.” 

Steve draws in a sharp breath, but before he can say anything to that startling suggestion Bucky grips his wrist tighter, spinning Steve around to face him. Bucky presses forward, their bodies flush now, and leans his hands against the top of the desk on either side of Steve’s body. Steve meets Bucky’s intent, blue gaze with a wide-eyed stare of open questioning. 

Bucky’s eyes drop to his lips. 

“Feel free to stop me if I’ve got this all wrong,” Bucky says, just above a whisper. 

Then he’s leaning in, slowly enough for Steve to say something, only his brain is just catching up. 

“You—” Steve stammers, and Bucky freezes immediately so he hurries to finish, “you’re not wrong.” 

They fall together at once, mouths meeting messy and ungraceful in both their haste, and Bucky lets out a soft noise like he’s been punched—which finally, above anything yet, cuts through the haze of disbelief Steve feels. _Bucky wants this too_. 

The realization sets a fire in his blood, flaming up his neck and cheeks. He pulls back a little to break the frenzied kiss, reaching up to finally— _finally_ —wrap his fingers in Bucky’s soft, slightly damp hair, and hold him in place. Steve wants to take the time to kiss him properly. This time when their mouths meet it’s slow, Steve savoring the slide of Bucky’s full bottom lip against his. 

Then it’s Bucky who breaks away, muttering, “ _Fuck_ you’re a good kisser—Steve, that mouth—” 

His eyes are hooded and breath a little heavier than warranted. He reaches down to grip the back of Steve’s legs, hoisting him up before Steve can blink so that he’s sitting on the desk with Bucky bracketed between his thighs as he leans in again to kiss him senseless. 

It grows heated much faster than Steve expects—but then the whole thing is unexpected—and he chases Bucky’s tongue with his own, drawing a moan out of him that sends another jolt through Steve’s spine. He wraps one of his legs around the back of Bucky’s, pulling him in closer, gasping when Bucky’s hard-on grinds against his thigh. 

Steve plants his hands on Bucky’s chest, slowing them down again (though that isn’t the best of plans—Bucky’s body is muscled and lean and _good god_ —), looking searchingly into Bucky’s face. Bucky looks back at him, mouth parted and shiny with kissing, but eyes wide and earnest. 

“What—what’s your plan here, Buck?” Steve asks, as steadily as he can. 

“I—whaddyou mean?” he rasps back. 

“I mean where is this—where’d this come from? You never—”

Bucky puffs a little, humorless laugh. “What’d you want Steve? For me to introduce myself with somethin’ like ‘hey nice to meet you, Bucky Barnes—say you seem like you might be a little queer, me too! By the way thanks for saving my ass from the alien invaders…’? You might’a just stabbed me with a fishing spear, if I’d guessed wrong.”

Steve frowns, giving him a soft punch to the shoulder. “Jerk. No! I don’t expect it’s the first thing you’ll tell a stranger but…why’d you—why now?”

Bucky drops his eyes, chewing on his bottom lip—it’s a habit Steve hasn’t been able to keep himself from noticing over the days they’ve been together, but it’s infinitely harder to ignore it now with Bucky’s mouth inches away. It takes all the will power he has not to say screw it he doesn’t care why and just get his mouth on Bucky again. He resists—barely. 

“We might—I mean—” Bucky huffs, running a hand through his hair before meeting Steve’s eyes frankly. “There’s a decent chance we’re not getting out of this goddamn basement alive. If we do, there’s even less chance we see the end of next week. Why the fuck wait if there was even a possibility you felt the same way?”

“Yeah, shit I—alright,” Steve says. He presses forward, tilting up to run a trail of kisses down the column of Bucky’s throat. Bucky lets his head tip back, and Steve wraps a hand around the back of his neck as he continues down to kiss across Bucky’s collar bones. 

“H-hang on,” Bucky says, a little breathy. Steve stops. “Why didn’t _you_ say anything if…if you wanted to? Toss me a hint at least?”

It’s Steve’s turn to look away, a bit flustered. But Bucky was honest with him, and the least he can do is return it—even if he feels like he’s putting his heart out on a plate. 

“Buck you…I don’t—have anyone else. When you asked me to come along to New York with you…it meant I wasn’t gonna die on my own out here, is all. I wasn’t gonna risk that for a maybe.” 

Bucky takes a deep breath, working his jaw while Steve tries to guess what he’s thinking. But when his eyes flick back up to Steve’s the expression is raw and charged, and he dives to kiss him roughly, mercilessly. Steve is taken aback, but just for a heartbeat, before he kisses him back the same. Bucky’s right—what the fuck kind of time do they have to waste?

Steve wraps his legs around Bucky’s waist, and his hands find their way again into Bucky’s hair. Bucky growls low in his throat, sliding his arms under Steve’s ass to lift him from the desk, stumbling back across the dark basement and crashing down on his knees on the mattress so that Steve sprawls back onto the blanket, and Bucky falls against him. 

Being slight has had its disadvantages now and again, Steve thinks, but jesus if he doesn’t love Bucky picking him up and tossing him around like it’s nothing. 

“Get rid of this,” Steve whispers, tugging at Bucky’s undershirt. Bucky pushes himself back, obliging clumsily. 

“You too,” he says, and Steve sits up to strip out of his as well. 

Steve runs his hands over Bucky’s muscular chest, the flat planes of his stomach, and groans a little. He’s even better built than Steve had guessed under his shapeless army uniform and borrowed clothes. 

Bucky’s gazing down at him with something like reverence, and Steve knows he’s already flushed but feels himself blush even harder. 

“God, you look like an angel, your fucking skin—you’re perfect, Steve,” Bucky says in a rough, low voice. Steve’s back arches up in response, and Bucky grinds his hips down against Steve’s, pulling another moan from him. The thin layer of their shorts doesn’t do much to hide either of their arousal—though it’s still much too much of a barrier between them for what Steve wants. His hands clutch at Bucky’s lower back, beading a little with sweat now, gripping him closer and urging him to do it again. 

He does, dipping his head forward at the same time to suck a bruising kiss over the white expanse below Steve’s sharp collar bone. 

“If we’d met in New York—I’d’ve done it right for you,” Bucky murmurs against Steve’s neck, hips taking up a rhythmic drag against Steve’s. “Maybe we’d have met at a club…would’ve asked you to dance. Kissed you maybe, out back. Asked you on a date, treated you like you deserve—”

“If we’d met in New York,” Steve growls, gripping his fingers into Bucky’s shoulders, “I’d be letting you fuck me sideways right now. But we’ve got about thirty miles of hiking left so I think we’d better save it—”

Bucky’s hips jerk a little at “fuck me sideways” and he laughs. “Face like an angel but you’ve got a devil’s mouth on you, huh Rogers?” 

“What was it you were just sayin’ about giving me what I deserve?” 

“Everything,” Bucky says, fervently, ignoring the sarcasm and making Steve melt even further than he’s already gone—putty in Bucky’s hands. 

“I’ll hold you to that, if I get the chance,” he pants, twisting up under Bucky’s lithe body pressed against his, the need for more becoming too much to bear. “For now though, maybe something a little expedited—for the end of the world?” 

Bucky gives him a filthy smirk, already sliding down Steve’s body and hooking his fingers in the waistband of Steve’s shorts as he goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, a little respite from danger to take advantage of with some soft sexy basement times ;)
> 
> As always I am loving hearing what you guys think, drop me a comment!


	7. The Exodus of New York

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bit of a long one for you today--enjoy!

They doze. They eat one of the rationed meals Steve organized (Bucky predictably insisting on splitting it evenly halfway despite every attempt on Steve’s part to do otherwise). And they fuck again too, slower the second time, like they’ve got all the time in the world. _And maybe we do_ , Steve thinks, _who knows how much time this world’s got left anyway?_

Bucky wraps Steve up in his arms after, tucked up tight and warm against his body. 

“Don’t have to pretend to be asleep first to hold you now.” He mumbles into Steve’s shoulder. 

“Don’t have to pretend to be asleep to let you,” Steve shoots back. 

But soon (too soon) they both feel the outside world creeping in again around the edges. It’s been silent long enough that they know it’s time to attempt to push on. It makes Steve’s stomach flutter nervously, thinking of leaving this safe bubble, as tenuous as that safety it is, and facing the possibility that they’re walking right back into imminent danger. But there’s no avoiding that, even if they stayed here weeks and weeks, until all of it crashed in around them. One way or another they _have_ to face it. And the knowledge of Bucky’s family in New York pulls more and more urgently on both of them. 

So it’s with humming anticipation as well as reluctance that they tug on their clean, dry clothes and roll up their camp blanket into the pack. Steve fills their canteen at the tap while Bucky laces up his boots. 

They both stand in front of the door for a long moment, bracing themselves. Then Steve undoes the chain and deadbolt (a funny, mundane gesture considering everything) and tugs open the door. 

Bucky’s prediction about the state of the house proves to be correct, as a huge tumble of rubble immediately spills in across the floor in a slide of debris, making them both jump back. But it makes more sense at least why they were apparently so well hidden from the searching Martians. 

Steve peers up over the slide of rubble, and can see a sliver of sky at the top of what was the stairwell. He looks at Bucky and shrugs. 

“Here we go,” he says. 

Steve goes first, scrambling as delicately as he can up the unstable pile of wood and chunks of concrete and dirt, trying not to send it sliding back down at Bucky behind him. He’s glad he’s ahead though, with Bucky’s heavier build Steve can see that he’s sending much more of the slope slipping away under him as he fights his way up. 

Finally they emerge onto the leveled street above them, the houses stretching off on either side in varying states of ruin. 

There’s no sign of the Martians in their machines, and everything is quite. But the world around them is still a deeply unsettling sight—Steve blinks a few times to make sure it isn’t just his eyes. 

In their wake, the Martians seem to have left the horrid, crawling red weed to finish their business. While Steve and Bucky sheltered below, the land above them had been steadily engulfed in red. 

The vines and creeping tendrils cover the streets, the trees, the remaining walls of buildings. The thick scarlet carpet is everywhere, choking out everything else. Steve kicks at a vine in distaste, the pulpy leaves hardly budging where it clings to the cracked sidewalk. 

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Steve says to Bucky, as he reaches the top of the wreckage and stumbles to a halt next to him. 

They set a much more vigorous pace now than they had even managed to maintain before, after scraping through town to replenish their meager supplies. 

For one, they move faster with the knowledge of their lost days—however many it might have been, as it now appears to be late afternoon again—and for another, much better rested than they have been since falling into the Millstone River. Actually, Steve thinks to himself as he plants his feet briskly alongside Bucky’s longer strides, he’s probably better rested than he’s been since the day before the Martians even landed in Grover’s Mill since he spent that night at his desk. 

Once again, Steve thanks whoever might be listening that he’d grown out of his childhood fatigues. He knows he still has to be as attentive to his lungs as he can—but so far he’s been able to keep up with the efforts of their trek without much more than the weariness and soreness anyone would expect. 

They manage more miles than they have in any of their previous days, and after a short but necessary sleep sheltered under a bridge, the next morning rewards them with a road sign: New York City, 12 miles. 

Bucky breathes out a long exhale, eyes fixed on it for a moment. 

“We’ll be there tonight, then,” he says. 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, reaching out to twine his fingers with Bucky’s. “We’ll make it.” 

They continue on hand in hand for the next hour. 

Soon though they exit the back road they’d been making their way on, and onto one of the main highways into the city, and they release each other at once. 

The roadway is crammed with bodies, clusters of people moving at different speeds, some stopped, huddled on the side of the road, others by turns running. It’s a jolt after their handful of days spent mostly in empty, desolated towns to be confronted by this heaving crush of humanity. The faces remind Steve of the smaller exodus they’d witnessed further south—but this is more than one town—it’s _New York_ spilling out of its confines, fleeing into the wilderness. 

It’s utterly democratic in the scope of it—the Martians’ attack leaving no differentiation between the strong and the weak, the rich or the poor, the powerful and the powerless. They are all of them equal now in terror and helplessness. Frightened men and haggard women, exhausted children and wild-eyed dogs, men in expensive suits rubbing shoulders with breadline day laborers. And mingled in among them too are wounded soldiers—as lost and defenseless as the rest. 

It’s an undisciplined march, without order and without a goal—a million people or more unarmed and unprovisioned driving, headlong. _It’s the beginning of the rout of civilization, the massacre of mankind._

“Jesus,” Bucky breathes as they shoulder their way through the surging, mindless mess, pushing their way upstream toward New York. 

“Hey buddy,” Steve says, grabbing the sleeve of a weary looking soldier, who turns a blank stare at him. “You come from the city? What happened up there?”

“They came last night—heard ’em working all day, out past the city limits. Army set up tryin’ to block ’em when they came but…” he trails off, and beside Steve Bucky looks away, ashen faced. “Like bows and arrows against the lightning, once they brought the heat rays. Some people ran—don’t know what else.” 

He tugs his sleeve free of Steve’s grip, and trudges onward, dead-eyed expression never faltering. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, voice strained, “What if—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Steve cuts him off, sharply, “don’t do that. They only started in on the city last night. That’s better than we hoped.”

Bucky nods, but his eyes are distant, forehead furrowed in worry. 

Steve bites his cheek, and casts a glance around them at the confusion of bodies. He reaches out and takes Bucky’s hand in his again, threading his fingers in Bucky’s. 

Bucky darts a glance at their linked hands, at back at Steve’s face, surprised, then around at the people surrounding them. 

Steve squeezes his hand. “This is the wreck of humanity Buck. Nobody has time to give a shit about this.” 

And he’s right. As they fight their way through the crowd, hardly anyone offers a second look. A handful, maybe, drop eyes to their clasped hands and move on without a change of expression. A man or two exerts the effort for a slight frown. But no more. 

At a crossroads, Steve sees a woman seated on the grass in front of the mileage sign spot them. She’s middle aged, a schoolmarm looking type with a softly lined face sitting beside another woman. She looks at Bucky and Steve’s hands, and makes eye contact for a moment with Steve. Then she turns, dropping the bag she’d been clutching to her chest, and takes the other woman’s startled face in her hands and kisses her hard. Steve smiles and ducks his head. One good moment in the midst of all this, he thinks, is worth clinging onto. 

Occasionally, small scuffles break out among the throng, or someone begins to run sending those around them into a panicked scurry as well. Steve and Bucky wind their way through it as best they can. 

Even moving slower than they’d hoped through the refugees, they finally reach the edge of the bay—the water stretching out black and blank in the falling evening gloom, the odd, patchy lights of the city beyond. 

“We’ll…we’ll have to cross the bridge,” Steve says in a hushed voice, though they can’t see the Martians in this light or from this vantage. He can’t hear any evidence of them either, and he wonders if they’re resting after their day’s endeavors. “Think it’s better in the dark, or worse?”

“I think…I don’t care.” Bucky replies honestly, turning desperate eyes to Steve. “I—my ma—I can’t wait Steve, please let’s just…just go.” 

Steve nods agreement. He knows Bucky would’ve said the same if they’d arrived in broad daylight, and he thinks probably it is for the best to make their way in under cover of dark anyway, so perhaps the timing is lucky. 

But nothing appears to stop them as they run as silently as they can across the bridge. The length of it is jammed with abandoned cars, trucks, and discarded belongings scattered everywhere. 

Moving into the city, still running as soundlessly as their feet can land, they’re surprised to find that the streets aren’t deserted. It isn’t even quiet. There’s evidence of looters, and a drunken crowd crows from the door of a half smashed bar as Steve and Bucky fly past, exchanging a wry look. 

New York City, even fallen to its knees like it is, still resists being anything but teeming. Even if the life around them has taken on a chaotic, fractured edge, there are some things here that can’t be crushed as long as there is breath in the inhabitants’ bodies. It’s impossible to tell which of the fires smoldering in the streets were caused by the Martians, and which were set by that certain type of New Yorker who seems always ready for whatever excuse presents itself to turn feral. 

But there’s evidence of what _has_ passed here—streets in which a thick ash clings to the lower parts of buildings, leftover from the Martians’ suffocating black smoke, and the melted remains of the few army vehicles that managed to make their futile way this far in.

Blocks and blocks they run, past looted shops and apartments where people clearly spent some time hurling possessions from the windows for no good reason Steve can guess at, until finally the painful, familiar spires of the Brooklyn Bridge rise ahead of them lit by eerie flame. 

Steve gives a sigh of relief at the sight of it—only it comes out as more of a wheezing, gasping cough. He hasn’t run so far or so fast since his flight through Grover’s Mill and he’s beginning to feel that burning tightness in his lungs, but he dreads asking Bucky to slow down, when their destination is so near now…maybe if he can just make it through to his family’s building…

But Bucky skids to a halt as soon as he hears the sound of Steve’s breath struggling from him, spinning to grip Steve’s shoulders and bring him to a stop too. 

“Stevie, your lungs—god! I’m sorry I didn’t think, didn’t remember…come here,” and he pulls Steve out of the center of the road, leaning him up against the dingy brick wall of a Chinese restaurant. “You should’ve…let’s catch our breath,” he finishes, worrying his lip between his teeth as he peers at Steve. 

Steve holds up a hand as he pants, trying to calm his breathing with as slow a stream of inhales as he can manage to tamp down the building tension. 

After a few moments of steady gasping, he manages to feel like the looming attack is subsiding—not entirely, he knows if he had to sprint again now it would overtake him—but enough to keep it at bay if he’s careful. 

“S—sorry Bucky,” he wheezes. “You—you should go, tell me where you’ll be, maybe, and I’ll catch up—don’t let me slow you dow—”

Bucky doesn’t let him finish the sentence, sweeping Steve instead into a tight embrace and burying his face in his neck for several heartbeats. 

“Not on your life. You’re stuck with me, end of the line okay?” He says after a moment, pulling back and giving Steve’s shoulders a little shake to emphasize his words. “We’ve come this far right?” 

Steve nods, but his face is twisted up with the guilt of it. Bucky just glares back fiercely. 

“Wouldn’t I be dead three times over without you, huh?” 

Steve nods again, ducking his head and taking a long breath, holding it in as long as his lungs allow. 

Then he releases it in a long exhale, and looks back at Bucky. “Wouldn’t I be?”

Bucky leans in and kisses him, just a swift, hard press of their mouths before stepping back. 

“That’s why we gotta stick together. I’m not gonna leave you here of all places after that, dummy, I’d probably walk straight into a heat ray or somethin’ with our odds.” He wraps his hand in Steve’s. “Come on, we’ll walk. Won’t take long from here anyway.” 

Brooklyn is marginally quieter than Manhattan had been, if only thanks to there being fewer places that people on the brink of extinction still feel are worth stealing from. 

Now that they’re walking—Steve setting the pace, as Bucky tries to move slower even than Steve wants to—Steve begins looking around him more. Even after having been away, after burying his mom and leaving it behind, this place is _home_. And something about that makes it the worst yet to see changed by the Martians. It’s not that it’s been particularly brutalized even, compared to the full decimation of the town where they’d harbored in the basement. It doesn’t seem like the Martians in their machines have yet turned to all-out destruction here—but he can still see their fingerprints on the haunted streets. 

Bucky takes another turn up a familiar avenue, and Steve swallows a gulp, realizing that they’re moving closer and closer to the apartment he’d shared with his own ma. 

“We close?” Steve asks. 

“Coupla blocks,” Bucky replies, hushed. 

The next turn takes them away from the path Steve would’ve taken to walk home, and he’s both sorry and grateful for a moment. He pauses, looking over his shoulder up the block, lone streetlight flickering. Six up, four down and he could be back there. If there were anything to go back for. The fact that there isn’t—that wasn’t the Martians’ doing at least.

Bucky halts finally in front of a row of narrow brownstones. The building has seen better days, Steve thinks, but it’s still nice enough—much bigger than the brick apartment building he’d lived in. Big enough, he supposes, for a family that was once six. 

Bucky moves swiftly off to the side of it, rummaging in a little garden of half-dead potted plants now coated in dark ash, and returns with a key. 

He lets them in to the darkened house. 

“Ma? Alice! Anybody here?” he calls as Steve follows him into the quiet front hall. 

There’s no answer. 

“Wait here,” Bucky whispers to Steve as he slips away into the house, moving faster in the dark than Steve would be able to, not knowing the shape of it. 

Steve slumps against the wall of the crowded little front hall, eyes adjusting to the dimness to rove over a coatrack crammed with jackets and hats, a bicycle propped behind the door, a stack of mail on a hall table scattered partially to the floor. 

His eyes catch on a white envelope, not stacked with the rest, but tucked into the chipped frame of the mirror hanging above the table. It’s not addressed, but simply reads _Bucky_ on the front in a precise, looping script. Steve reaches out and plucks it from the mirror just as Bucky returns from his search, a strained expression on his face. 

“They aren’t here,” he says, unnecessarily. 

“Look,” Steve replies, handing him the letter. 

Bucky frowns, taking it, then rips it open and scans it hastily. He lets out a small, distressed noise and shuts his eyes, thrusting the sheet at Steve and turning away with his hands in his hair. 

Steve squints to make out the handwriting. 

_Bucky, my darling, I hope that you never need to read this. But you’re stubborn as a mule, and I have a feeling that as soon as all of this broke out you began charging your way up here to us. If you have, I’m sorry that we won’t be here—but the city seems like the worst place to remain. I’m taking the girls and Mrs. Donnelley north, try to get out of populated areas and wait this thing out. I don’t know exactly where we’re going my love. Stay safe, don’t do anything foolish. Your sisters and I will do the same, so that we can find one another again soon. All my love, Mama_

“Bucky?” Steve asks, hesitantly, dropping the letter to his side. Bucky is still standing facing away, his arms clasped around himself now. Steve reaches out to place a tentative hand on his shoulder. 

Bucky starts at the contact, like he’d forgotten Steve was there, and spins, scooping Steve up into his arms with a shuddering breath. Steve wraps his arms around Bucky’s neck, standing on tiptoes to let Bucky bury his face in Steve’s shoulder as Steve strokes his hair. 

“I—it’s good—it’s good right? That they aren’t here?” Bucky asks him in a small voice that breaks Steve’s heart. 

“Yeah Buck, it’s better—your ma is smart, look at the date—she got ’em out before the army even. They were out before all the—it’s good, it’s good.” He chants the last soothingly, like a mantra. 

“Yeah…yeah,” Bucky agrees, still sounding wretched, and he pulls away with a twisted expression. “I just…I know it’s safer, somewhere else but now…they’re not with _me_ and I can’t _know_. I feel like I need to see them or else wonder…” 

“I know—I know,” Steve says, cupping Bucky’s face in his hands. There’s nothing else to say. Bucky’s right, it may be better for their odds, but it isn’t the same as Bucky being with them, seeing them whole and hale and being able to help them himself. 

“Will—will you show me around?” Steve asks after a moment, thinking it might be a good idea to distract him, as well as out of genuine curiosity. “This is where you grew up, yeah?”

Bucky nods, swallowing, and takes Steve’s hand to guide him deeper into the house. “There’s not much…bedrooms upstairs, but mine isn’t there anymore. Janey inherited it soon as I moved out.”

“Can I—?” Steve asks, gesturing at the mantelpiece in the living room which is crowded with framed photographs. Bucky waves for him to go ahead. 

The photos are of varying qualities and ages—a professional wedding portrait that Steve assumes must be Bucky’s parents, the family smiling on a beach with a teenaged Bucky holding Mary as a baby, Bucky’s portrait in his dress uniform, somebody’s birthday, a staged photo of the children where one of the girls is crying and Bucky appears to have a black eye. 

“Got in deep shit for that one with my ma,” Bucky says softly behind Steve’s shoulder, following his eye line. “Got into it with a kid at school over a baseball game the day before we were supposed to get these pictures taken, woke up with the worst shiner I ever had. She was hopping, and Janey was so upset about it she wouldn’t stop crying. We all think it’s pretty funny now though.” 

“You look like your dad,” Steve comments, eyes trailing over a yellowed photo of a young man holding up a fish and fishing rod, smiling proudly. He has the same tousled hair and dip in his chin. Steve sees it on one of the sisters as well, though the other three take more after Bucky’s mom—and Bucky’s Cupid ’s bow mouth seems to be hers as well. It’s a handsome family, though what stands out the most is how happy they seem together. There’s so much love there, captured in grainy black and white. Steve feels a hand grip his heart for a moment in fear for them. _Please let me be right, let them be safe_ , he thinks. 

“Steve…” Bucky says in a low voice, drawing his attention back to the moment. Steve turns to Bucky, and finds that his head is ducked low. 

“Yeah Buck?” Steve asks, stepping forward to place a soft hand on the back of Bucky’s neck. Bucky looks up at him from under his lowered lashes. 

“I just…” he pauses. “Thank you.”

Steve huffs. “What for?” 

“For—for being here, I guess.” Bucky says, looking up now all the way to meet Steve’s gaze. “If I were here alone I don’t know what…I’d go crazy, probably.” 

Steve’s brow furrows, not sure of what to say that might be a balm to this loss-that-isn’t-yet-a-loss but still must ache like it. 

“I don’t know where I’d be otherwise,” he says, honestly. “Goes both ways pal.” 

Bucky nods minutely. Then he leans in, tentative, searching Steve’s face as if for permission. Steve gives it to him readily, closing the distance between their mouths with a small sigh. 

Bucky’s hands slide around Steve’s waist as he presses into the kiss, lips parting to invite Steve to deepen it. Steve does, sweeping his tongue against Bucky’s. He puts both hands on Bucky’s chest, pushing him backwards toward the faded floral sofa until his knees hit the back and he flops back with a small noise. Steve follows, straddling his thighs, still kissing. 

Bucky’s hands slide lower along Steve’s sides, landing to tug his hips closer and circling his own up against him. 

Steve breaks away with a breathy laugh, “On your ma’s couch?” 

Bucky smirks, wryly, “Sure it’s seen worse.” 

Steve makes a face, “Jeez, set the mood why don’t you—”

But Bucky cuts him off with a hand twining in his hair, pulling him back in and kissing him hot and dirty so that Steve can’t help but forget all about whatever he was saying. 

“Buck,” Steve tries, one more time, pulling away and breathing heavily, “we—shouldn’t we be figuring out a plan or something—”

Bucky shakes his head, eyes hooded and dark, “My ma said not to do anything stupid and I swear to god Steve, if we try to think of what to do next right now it’s _gonna_ be stupid.” 

The corner of Steve’s mouth curves up. “So you’re saying me putting your dick in my mouth right now is the key to your survival?” 

Bucky’s breath hitches a little and he grinds up again into Steve, swallowing hard. “Y—yeah. Something like that. Or the other way around, I’m not picky.” 

“Well then,” Steve says, tipping in to run the edge of his teeth up Bucky’s throat, nipping at his earlobe. “Guess I’d better not ruin my record of keeping you safe now.”

Bucky moans agreement, flipping Steve onto his back on the couch.


	8. The Thunder Child

They creep back out of the house in the steel grey of dawn cresting over the city. 

In the light, the black ash coating the lower halves of the buildings and the street is even more apparent, muffling everything like snow. Bucky slings his arm around Steve’s shoulder as they hit the bottom step of the stoop, turning for a final look at the place. 

Both of them jump when a soft voice in a thick Irish accent to their right breaks across the stillness, “Bucky? James Barnes is that you?”

Bucky’s head swivels around, looking for the source of the voice, eyes landing on a small window set at street level in the house next door. 

“Mrs. O’Hara?” 

“Oh—Bucky! Thank god you’re alright!” There’s a scuffling, and a basement door opens to allow a small, plump woman to tumble out. She crashes into Bucky, wrapping her arms around him. She immediately bursts into tears as Bucky pats her back, Steve looking on bewildered. 

“Mrs. O’Hara, why are you still here?” Bucky asks, as the woman pulls away, wiping her eyes. She’s in her late 40’s, careworn and rumpled looking, and Bucky regards her with fond exasperation. 

“I—oh angel it’s good to see you—what on earth are we going to do?” the woman asks distractedly. Bucky gives her a gentle shake by the shoulders to get her attention, and she looks back at him with red-rimmed eyes. “Your ma was so smart—got out before anything—she tried to convince us to come but Lizzy is due any day and I didn’t want to—it was such a mistake, to stay—”

Steve and Bucky share a glance over her head, and Bucky gives a small frown to indicate he’s not quite sure what she means either. 

“Are you hurt, Mrs. O’Hara?” 

She takes a deep breath, calming a little, though she continues to wring her hands in front of her. 

“No—no we come through alright. Took to the downstairs when they came through blasting that awful smoke—have you seen them? They—but now they’re here and how can we get away?” 

“Who else is with you? Is Tommy around?” 

“No-oo,” her voice cracks a little, “he’s upstate, left Lizzy with me in case the baby come early—”

“So it’s just you and Lizzy? Is she—is the baby alright?” 

Mrs. O’Hara nods her head. “She had some pains, the night they marched in, but it stopped now. but she _can’t_ have it here, and where can we—”

They share another look, Bucky’s eyebrows raised in question, and Steve nods emphatically. 

“It’s alright. We—we’ll help you. You’re right, we can’t stay here.” 

“Where then?” Mrs. O’Hara asks, flicking a worried, trusting glance between Bucky and Steve. 

Bucky chews his lip, glancing at Steve. They’d talked over several possibilities of what to do next, where to go, but few of them are much use with a woman expecting to go into labor at any time. Only one, really, seems like it’s even close to possible. 

“A boat,” Bucky says, firmly, and Steve nods again. “We’ll have to go—we’ll get you down to the harbor. There’s got to be ships still that can get up the coast, away from the city where it’s safer, hopefully.” 

She nods, a little jerkily. “Whatever you think—oh, if you hadn’t come—”

“Go tell Lizzy to get ready Mrs. O’Hara, it’s best if we don’t wait,” Bucky says, interrupting her as kindly as possible. The little woman turns and hurries again for the basement steps, and Bucky lets out a long sigh. 

“Didn’t uh, didn’t expect that. I’m sorry, this makes it all a bit more…” He says, a little sheepishly to Steve. 

“Think I’d do any different do you?” Steve demands. 

Bucky smiles softly at him. “Nah, guess not.” He flicks his eyes toward the basement. “Mrs. O’Hara’s lived here my whole life—her son Tommy was two years above me in school, Lizzy’s his wife. Jesus though—havin’ a baby in the middle of all this…”

“You’re right, we’ll get on a boat.” Steve says, firmly. “It’s the best way, get up the coast a bit, out of the thick of it, like your ma said—out of the city’s better. And there’s gotta be other—other folks who can help with that, if her time comes and all…” 

Steve trails off, sounding less certain or reassuring than he’d meant to. Truth is he doesn’t really know anything about having a baby, and he suspects that this is not the way he wants to have to learn. She just has to make it down to the harbor, he thinks. They can make it. 

Mrs. O’Hara returns shortly, a fat carpet bag over one arm and a wan looking young woman leaning on the other. She walks unsteadily, one hand on the (by Steve’s assessment) impressive swell of her belly. 

Bucky steps forward at once to slip an arm around her waist, letting her lean heavily on him, and she squeezes his arm in gratitude. Steve takes Mrs. O’Hara’s bag. 

“Steve Rogers, ma’am,” he says, “it’s nice to meet you and I’m sure it would be a pleasure under other circumstances.” 

Mrs. O’Hara gives him a watery smile and pats his cheek. “Oh dear, all of Bucky’s friends are always such charmers.” 

Steve shoots Bucky an amused glance, wondering if “all Bucky’s charming friends” is who he thinks it might be, and sees Bucky blushing furiously. 

“Come on, ladies. Gotta get across the city quick.” He says, resolutely not meeting Steve’s eye as he sets off, half-carrying the pregnant Lizzy. 

 

Making their way through New York toward the water at a pregnant woman’s pace, Steve has a better chance to look around him. And what he finds is unsettling. 

The Martians have, to all appearances, taken an entirely different tack in New York than in any of the smaller towns they’ve passed through. Steve has seen exactly what they can do when they’re set on total destruction—leveling buildings as easily as breaking through a house of cards. But he doesn’t see that happening here. Instead, what he notices is something much more worryingly strategic in their progress. 

Houses and shops they’ve left intact. But railways, police stations, a munitions storage, all of that they’ve laid to waste. Apparently they have bigger plans for the city than simply razing it—and that is a frightening prospect. They’ve hamstrung the city. Steve thinks back on the squat metal spider with its basket of bodies. Whatever the Martians were doing with them, they seem to want a good number of the inhabitants of New York whole and unburned by their rays. 

At the mouth of the Gowanus canal, they find that they aren’t the only ones with the same thought—a boat out of New York. The waterfront is thronging with people, shouting and surging to climb aboard any of the odd flotilla of vessels scattered about. 

When Steve glances up the canal, where it disappears in toward the city, he sees why—a half-dozen Martian machines are moving languidly between the buildings, now and again slicing through a bridge like paper. They don’t appear to be in any hurry to deal with the shouting mass of people, but undoubtedly, Steve thinks, it’s because they don’t have any need to rush. He watches as one reaches into the upper parts of a building with its long, articulated claw and drags a body out through a broken window. He turns away, shoving down the bile rising in his stomach. 

They push forward to where a stream of people is pouring onto a hodge-podge of ferries, cargo ships, even an oil tanker. Whatever had been near enough when the Martians came to make shore to take on fleeing people. Bucky is in the lead shielding Lizzy from the crowd, and Steve following Mrs. O’Hara in the back close behind. Bucky is tall and strong enough to elbow his way steadily along, eyes locked on the gangplank of a ferry boat just ahead—the decks are already crowded, but a weathered looking crewmember is waving more aboard, occasionally taking a bulky piece of luggage out of someone’s hands and hurling it into the water. 

They make the edge of the gangplank, Steve’s heart hammering, and Bucky pulls Lizzy up the swaying walkway. Steve pushes Mrs. O’Hara to follow. 

And just as they do the Martians up the waterway release one of their undulating cries, voices raised in unison. The terrified crowd around them heaves as one, turning to all out hysteria. 

Steve, as if in the thrall of the alien cry, turns to look, and sees the machines—all of them pulled up to their full height, several stories tall. And they’re facing now in the direction of the fleeing ships, they stalk as one up the canal toward them. 

He’s fixed on them, the gleam of the imposing metallic domes in the morning sun, for just a moment too long. 

An elbow catches him from the panicked mob, knocking him off the end of the gangplank, back onto the pier, stunned momentarily on his back and trying not to get trampled by feet…

Steve hears a massive splash and the beginning roar of the ferry engine as it pulls away slowly up the dock, not stopping to detach the walkway but simply letting it crash to the water below. 

Steve looks up to the deck—straight into Bucky’s shocked, despairing face. 

His mouth and eyes are wide with horror as Steve struggles to stand, eyes still locked with Bucky’s as the water begins to churn. 

“Go!” Steve shouts, waving his arm at Bucky, “go!” 

Bucky’s mouth opens on a shout that is lost in the noise of the engines, now come fully to life. But he thinks it was “not without you.” Steve wills him silently to stay put, to go to safety with Mrs. O’Hara and Lizzy. 

But he watches, helpless, as Bucky fights his way down the packed deck of the boat—and just as the end of it is about to clear the dock beside it he steps back, bracing, and hurls himself over the rail in a massive leap toward the wood of the dock—

It’s ten feet down from the packed deck of the ferry, and at least six feet of water churning with the force of the engines below, and Steve doesn’t take a breath, doesn’t feel a heartbeat as he watches Bucky’s limbs windmill for a moment in open air and—

And land with a crash of limbs in a heap at the very end of the dock. 

Steve snaps himself finally from his paralysis, shoving forward toward Bucky’s motionless figure. Everyone else on the dock having missed the opportunity to board that particular vessel is massing the other direction, moving up toward the next one still boarding anybody. But one by one, each of the boats in the small harbor are pulling away, trying desperately to evade the Martians who are now just blocks up and closing the distance in long, unhurried strides. 

Steve reaches Bucky, flinging himself down beside his prone body and rolling him over. 

Bucky groans. “Ouch,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut tight in a pained wince. 

“ _Bastard_ ,” Steve says, gripping his shoulders as he sits up, not quite keeping his voice on the right side of hysteria, “you _bastard_ you were _safe_! You would have been _safe_ —”

Bucky grabs Steve’s shoulders back, shaking him, “Steve _stop_! I couldn’t Steve, not with you down here, I couldn’t—”

His protests are cut off by another high, ear-splitting wail. Three of the fighting machines have reached the mouth of the canal. Ignoring the crowd on the docks like one would ignore a swarm of gnats, they march forward, aiming to overtake the escaping fleet. The ferry from which Bucky had just jumped, carrying the O’Haras, banks sharply to avoid the path of one of the tall creatures, a stream of spray rising from it as the ship groans under the strain. 

The three huge monsters are positioned half across the harbor now, bottlenecking the little fleet, their towering legs sunk almost to the bottoms of the domes in the seawater. 

It looks as if the fate of those on board the ships is sealed, escape impossible now within the range of the ghastly heat rays. 

The Martian settled furthest into the harbor raises the awful funnel, fixed on an oil tanker and ready to fire—but it’s stopped at the final moment as a massive shape collides with the dome. 

The shape is a Navy destroyer. The ship called _Thunder Child_ , a hulking knife-like figure in the water—a state of the art vessel made for war. The machine it collided with stumbles, and the destroyer comes around in a plume of spray, training its guns on the creature. There’s a battering of canons and the injured Martian sinks the rest of the way, the water swallowing it up. 

All along the waterfront the frozen, horrified crowd shifts, erupting into exultant cheers at the victory. Steve hears people screaming the ship’s name, _Thunder Child!_ as it pulls around and aims itself straight at the second Martian. 

But the _Thunder Child_ has lost its element of surprise now, and as it barrels down toward the second machine both rise up to their full heights, trumpeting their furious calls, and brandishing their heat rays. 

The ship doesn’t come around again but charges full steam at the creature, straight on, and crashes into it in a hideous screech of metal. But the third Martian’s heat ray finds its mark—glaring hot and white in the steam that immediately rises off the water below—melting the _Thunder Child’s_ valiant heart. 

_Thunder Child_ , all its brave crew, and the second creature which it had managed to hit sink together slowly, a mangled twist of metal swallowed by the sea. 

But by the time the third creature has regained its footing, the little flock of vessels and everyone aboard them has made it through—shrinking on the horizon moving out to sea as they flee New York, out of the Martians range and on to safety. 

On the docks there’s nothing for a moment but a taut silence among those left behind. The destroyer, with all its heavy artillery and clever design, had for a moment felt like the last hope of humanity bringing some strength to bear against the creatures. And now it’s gone, with nothing but still water marking the place where she sank. 

Above them, a Martian calls out to its companions. The cry is taken up by each in turn, until Steve feels like there isn’t any sound at all in the world outside of the piercing shout ringing through his bones. 

As one, the crowd turns to flee. 

The earth belongs to the Martians.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all of your comments! Another twisty twist for you, what next? 
> 
> (Btw special thanks Tiass, Andy, Chelokay, and Bittercasgirl for ALL the comments that are making this posting experience really fun--can't wait to hear what you guys think about the last few!)


	9. New York in Shroud

“C’mon Steve, it’s time, gotta move.”

Bucky’s sharp whisper rouses Steve from his uneasy sleep, and Bucky’s arm tightens around his shoulders, shaking him gently awake. Steve blinks weariness from his eyes, already moving to comply. They’ve both gotten good at sleeping lightly and waking quickly over these past days. 

After the battle in the harbor, the Martians had spent the day destroying each and every bridge connecting greater New York City to the mainland, collapsing the tunnels as soon as they’d found people trying to flee that way. 

And then they began their slow, methodical search and destruction of the city and its unfortunate, remaining inhabitants. 

Steve and Bucky have tried to stay on the move, doubling back into streets and buildings that the machines have already searched for victims—although that has its own dangers, as it’s often followed by the collapse of them. 

Yesterday, they watched a machine pursue a man nimbly across an empty park, catching him up in one articulated claw and tossing him into its basket. 

The day before that, they witnessed a machine with a long needle draining the blood from a limp body. Bucky had retched quietly in the alley while Steve rubbed his back, and they’d spent two days sheltering in the chilled vault of an abandoned bank. But it’s not a good idea to stay in any one place for long. 

Steve is starting to wonder exactly what it is that they’re hiding from at this point—what they’re saving themselves for except one more day, maybe one more after that. He can’t see beyond. But the instinct to survive is too strong to dwell, and so they keep out of sight the best they can in a hope that _something_ of an alternative will present itself. Maybe the things will move on. 

Meanwhile around them, New York is lying in shroud in her black veil of ash and quiet, broken only by the crumbling of concrete and the occasional howl of a Martian. 

It’s dark out now, and while the Martians seem to be beyond the need for rest, their efforts relentless and indefatigable, they still need light to be most effective. Nighttime offers some cover at least as they make their way up a deserted street. 

There’s a rumble of falling debris somewhere nearby, and Steve and Bucky dart out of the street, pressing back against a brick wall to search for the source of a noise. Bucky glances up the block to their right, eyes landing on the sheltered doorway to a shabby looking antiques store. 

“In there, come on,” he says, tugging on Steve’s hand to follow. 

They slip in through an already broken window—broken by looters or Martians it’s impossible to say—shuffling forward around a cascade of furniture and books and broken things toward the back of it. 

They’re about to hunker down behind a busted up looking wardrobe when a scraping noise stills both of them at once. Steve’s sure that his heartbeat alone is loud enough to give them both away. 

But then they realize that the sound isn’t coming from outside, but from the back of the store, and they both turn as minutely as they can to see one of the high, stacked bookshelves sliding out of the way, revealing a pale lit white hallway beyond. 

A man steps out from behind the shelf, muttering to himself, then stops abruptly, scanning the room. His eyes land on Steve and Bucky with a look of mild surprise. 

“How’d you two get here?” he asks. 

He’s slightly built, though still a bit taller than Steve, with wild dark hair and a shadowing of stubble along his jaw. 

Bucky rises first, and Steve stands too, wavering at his shoulder. 

“You—Stark?” Bucky asks, his tone disbelieving. And Steve looks again, recognizing the man’s face from his various magazine appearances, now that Bucky’s named him. 

“The one and only,” the man says with a sideways smile, looking both of them up and down. “Well however you got here, better come on in—not safe up here on this level.” 

“Yeah we know,” Steve says, with a little bit of pique. Bucky elbows him. 

“Guess you would, huh?” Stark replies, unruffled. He turns to disappear again behind the bookcase, and after a quick shared glance of discussion, Steve and Bucky follow. 

The bookshelf slides back into place behind them, revealing it to be a reinforced concrete panel from the inside, making them share another doubtful look. 

“What is this place?” Bucky asks Stark’s retreating back as he leads them down a sterile hallway to a metal staircase, fluorescent lights flickering ominously. 

“This,” says Stark, opening another set of double metal doors into a huge, cavernous space full of odd half-built equipment that Steve can’t even begin to take in, “was supposed to be the Brooklyn headquarters for the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Which is of course highly classified and confidential information, but unfortunately for me or maybe fortunately for you,” he continues, beckoning them in, “they’re pretty much all dead at this point except for me. So I figure that means it’s confidential to whoever I feel like confiding in. Doubt it’s going to hurt the future of the war effort since we seem to be in the middle of losing an entirely different one now.” 

“What is it for?” Steve asks, peering around. 

Bucky’s staring at it all with his mouth agape, and Steve suddenly remembers what he’d said about going every year to the Stark Expo, how he’d been so enchanted by the futuristic technology then and what it might do one day. 

“Ah, lots of things that don’t matter now. We were set up for a few research projects but like I said, just me now and I’m just one man. One genius, this is true, but I still only got two hands. Come here and sit down, have a drink.”

“So you’re just hiding out down here alone? Stark what—” Bucky begins, and Stark cuts him off with a wave, holding a bottle of scotch in the other. 

“Call me Howard. Come on, have a scotch. Who’re you?”

“I—Bucky—Barnes. And this is Steve Rogers. What—”

Howard thrusts a tumbler of amber liquid into both of their hands, and Steve sniffs his, feeling it sting his eyes a little. Bucky shakes his head slightly, then throws his back without hesitation as Steve raises his eyebrows at him. Bucky just shrugs. _Why not?_ Steve thinks, taking a cautious sip and immediately frowning. But it burns in a way that if not pleasant isn’t exactly unpleasant either, so he takes another. 

Howard meanwhile throws himself into an armchair that looks like it might have originated from the (fake, Steve now realizes) antiques store upstairs, and sweeps an indolent hand toward another pair of them organized around a worn looking table. Behind him, Steve can see an army cot set up with a rumpled sleeping bag. He wonders how long Stark’s been down here. 

“Stark—Howard,” Steve starts, uncertainly, “do you realize—have you been up top? Have you seen…?”

“Course I have!” Howard barks, swinging his legs over the arm of his chair. “Why do you think I’m holed up down here? Look it’s clear we don’t have a damn thing to touch those machines right? So somebody’s gotta work on it or we’re toast—the whole human race! Way I see it the best person to do that is me.” 

“So that’s what you’re doing? Working on something to fight them with?” 

“Slowly but surely,” Howard agrees. “I figure twelve, maybe eighteen months I should have something worked up that’ll do the job.” 

“A _year_?” Steve asks, incredulous. He puts the glass of scotch down, suddenly angry with himself for having accepted it. This man has been hiding out down here, safe, while New York falls to shambles above. And Steve’s drinking his scotch. He feels like a traitor to his species. 

Howard’s brow furrows, and his gaze locks on Steve. “Look I don’t like it any more than you, buddy. But like I said, I’m only one genius—a year is damn quick for one person to develop a whole new line of weaponry to fight an enemy nobody even knew existed two weeks ago, you might think about cutting me some slack.” 

“And who do you think is going to be left in a year to benefit from that?” Steve demands. Bucky looks uncomfortably between them, shifting from one foot to the other. 

“I got some ideas. _Might_ even be able to put some of ’em into play if I had a little help,” he says, eyes narrowing at Steve. “Though if you’re just here to criticize you’re also free to go back out the way you came.” 

“Steve,” Bucky says softly, turning away from Howard, “we could…let’s hear him out, at least. Maybe there’s options here.” 

Steve clenches his jaw tight, but eventually relents. Bucky’s right. It’s worth at least hearing out what Howard has to say—better than returning immediately to the surface and their game of cat and mouse with the fighting machines anyway. He sinks stiffly into one of the open armchairs, and Bucky moves to do the same with a sigh of relief. 

Howard has been watching their exchange keenly, and a corner of his mouth turns up as they come to their agreement. 

“Glad to hear it,” he says, though they didn’t actually say anything to him. “But I’ve been working all day and my synapses are blinking so we’re gonna play some cards.” He swipes up a deck from the table and begins shuffling theatrically. 

Steve shoots a disapproving glance at Bucky, who shrugs again. 

“Can’t work without rest, kid,” Howard remarks, dealing efficiently. “That’s how you blow yourself up. Believe me, I’ve done it a time or two.” 

“And playing cards is rest?” Steve asks. 

“Rest for the _mind_ ,” Howard replies, tapping the deck in his hand to his temple. 

So they play cards. A few hands of rummy which Bucky wins easily until Howard gets put out and switches them to Baccarat, lamenting that they don’t have a fourth for bridge. Steve doesn’t fare well, unable to commit himself to any of it when his mind is still half-attuned to any noise of approach from above. 

Bucky and Howard have another scotch, and Steve can tell that Bucky is already listing from the alcohol thanks to their Spartan rationing of food supplies over the past days. Howard rises on unsteady feet of his own to toss them both an army MRE meal. 

Eventually Stark pours himself a final drink, throwing it back in one gulp as he stands. “I’m hitting the sack for a few hours. Show you boys around after some shut-eye huh?” 

“But—” Steve opens his mouth to protest, uncoiling his tense limbs form his own chair. 

“Steve,” Bucky wraps his hand around Steve wrist, looking up at him with pleading, slightly bleary eyes, “please? We can—we can both actually sleep for once, all the way. Shouldn’t we—?” 

Steve sighs, rubbing his forehead with his free hand. Bucky’s right. Neither of them have had a proper stretch of rest in days…and it’s not exactly like they were holding the city up when they were still running around in danger. But it rankles. Still, he nods assent, covering Bucky’s hand with his own as Bucky slumps in gratitude. 

“Only managed to scrounge up one other bunk mattress,” Howard drawls, stripping off his tie and suspenders as he moves to fling himself down on his cot, “But I’m thinking you fellas won’t bother too much about that—have at it.” 

Bucky’s eyes flick open at the implication as he releases Steve’s wrist—it’s instinct as much as anything for both of them to be discreet. But then what Howard actually said seems to sink in, and he and Steve share a considering look. 

Steve sets his jaw mulishly, the same feeling he’d had on the road among the evacuees taking him over. Even if Howard hadn’t meant it tolerantly, what do they care? The world is ending above him and they’ve just been playing at cards—he’s not going to forgo the small comfort of sleeping with Bucky’s comforting presence now, not for Howard Stark’s benefit. 

So they find the other bed and squeeze onto it together, Bucky’s arms wrapping around him. And Steve finds it much easier than he’d feared to fall asleep—so quickly in fact that he only has a few, fleeting moments to feel any guilt about it at all. 

 

Steve has to hand it to Howard, when he blinks awake several full, uninterrupted, and glorious hours of sleep later—after a rest he feels ready to take on just about anything. He’d never realized before what a luxury getting to sleep without having to keep one eye open was. 

The luxury of opening those eyes to Bucky’s face beside him is an entirely different kind of revelation. Bucky’s features are soft and slack, looking for the first time in days as young as he did when Steve first met him, tension smoothed away in dreaming. Steve feels a sudden, surging rush of emotion well up and spill from between his ribs. 

He _loves_ Bucky—of course he does!—it seems so obvious now that the word occurs to him. 

All through their long trek to New York Steve had thought he was following Bucky because he had nothing better to do and nothing of value of his own to run toward. But that hadn’t been true in some time. Somewhere on the road, _Bucky_ had become the precious, treasured thing Steve thought he didn’t have anymore. The thing he’d fight to the end of the earth for. 

It’s what he’s been doing for days—it seems all he needed was one quiet moment to realize it. 

The swelling bubble in his chest grows almost too painful to bear, and Steve leans over to place a feather-light kiss on Bucky’s slightly parted lips like a benediction. 

Then the feeling bursts. 

Having something—someone in this world—is hurt waiting to happen. How many times have they nearly lost one another already? How many times in the days since the scene on the docks has Steve thought this hour would be their last one, and that keeping just ahead of the curve can’t last forever as they run down what is surely a waning hourglass? 

Is it enough, knowing that all of that is still likely true, to have loved and been loved at the end? 

Because he’s certain, suddenly in his bones that Bucky loves him too. He’s known it, somewhere buried in him, since Bucky leapt from the ferry that would have taken him to safety, choosing instead to seal his fate with Steve’s. Maybe he knew before that. Is it better or is it worse to be facing death with the person he cares most for in the world? Before this all began Steve had been utterly alone, hadn’t known if he ever _would_ have someone to love like that again, painfully and unconditionally. This war brought him Bucky. Is that worth the knowledge that it will take them both too?

Steve doesn’t know. But it doesn’t matter—it just _is_. 

He smooths the lock of hair that has fallen across Bucky’s forehead back, running his fingers through the strands. Delicately he gets up, slipping out from under their shared blanket as quietly as he can so as not to wake him—Steve has his suspicions that Bucky has slept even less than he has these past days. 

Then he moves away to find Howard. 

The man isn’t anywhere in the cavernous hall of tech equipment, maybe moving elsewhere to let them sleep. Steve wonders how long they’ve been out, and how long Howard was actually able to rest himself. He thinks of the man’s unkempt hair and haggard face and feels a little twinge over how he’d chastised him. Maybe Stark is just as keenly aware of the earth burning above him, able to deal with it in the only way he knows how, surrounded by his gadgets and tools and doing his best to salvage some hope that there will be something left to save once he finds the means. 

That thought intensifies when Steve locates him, pushing through another set of metal doors into a smaller workspace, cluttered and cramped with tools and wires. Stark is leaning over a worktable with his back to Steve, muttering to himself. He jumps when Steve shuts the door behind him, spinning with a blowtorch in hand and a half-wild look which immediately calms back into the smirking insouciance he seems to wear like armor. 

“Good, you’re up—boyfriend still out?” he drawls. 

Steve hesitates for a moment, then tips his chin up in a nod. 

Stark sees the hesitation and gives him a small smile. “That’s good. You guys seem like you’ve had a rough go.” Then he adds, “Not that you seem too worried about it, but I don’t care. Been known to enjoy an evening at Everards myself now and again.” 

Steve raises his eyebrows in some mild surprise, Howard Stark being a known womanizer. 

Stark shrugs, flicking off the flame on the torch in his hand. “I’m an equal opportunity connoisseur of beauty, my friend. Your guy’s a picture—I get it.”

Steve suppresses a smile, shaking his head. “That’s real…progressive of you, I guess.” 

“Well I’m also a futurist, as all the rags like to say. I like to think I’m ahead of the curve in all my tastes, eventually everybody else’ll catch up that they’re missing out.” He laughs, setting down the things in his hands onto the worktable. “Earth is burning buddy—the future is here one way or another.” 

That reminds Steve of what he’d meant to come say, and his smile drops again. “Yeah. About that—”

Stark cuts him off with a flapping hand. “Look I know you think I’m a heel, tucked up safe down here while New York crumbles. And you’re right! I am. But I _know_ I can crack something that’ll put us on top again if I just—”

“Stark—Howard,” Steve breaks in, “I know. I wanted to say I’m sorry. You’re right, you’re just one guy. And we’re gonna need what you’re working on if we want anything to matter in the long run but—” Steve bites his cheek, trying to figure out what it is he wants to say, “but we’re three guys now. Right? So maybe we can…we can try to do a little more of both.”

Howard raises an eyebrow. “What’d you have in mind goldilocks?”

Steve purses his lips at the nickname, but opts to ignore it. “I think…I think you were right about you being the only person who might be able to make something that’ll fix this long term.” He pauses. “But I think I was right too—a year is a long way off, and it’s not going to be much use to fight back then if there isn’t anybody left to save. So I say we do both. If you can keep working in here, maybe—maybe Bucky and I can round up anybody who’s left up top. Just how big is this place?” 

Howard puts a thoughtful hand to his mouth, looking over Steve’s shoulder toward the door. “Yeah,” he muses. “Yeah it’s pretty big—got a network of offices, a few more storerooms besides this one. It’s provisioned pretty well too with the MREs, give us time to sort out how to feed people…”

He trails off again murmuring to himself distractedly. 

“So that’s a yes?” Steve prods. 

“What? Oh—yeah of course. You bring ’em down sunshine, and we’ll make sure they’re set up.”

Steve sags in relief, mind spinning away toward what he’s actually proposing. Wondering if Bucky will be on board. 

As if summoned by the thought, the door beside Steve swings open, Bucky poking his head in and looking relieved when he sees them. He’s still sleep tousled, his hair rumpled. He steps into the workroom and shoots a worried glance between Steve and Howard. 

“Everything okay?” he asks. 

“All copacetic my friend,” Howard says with a smirk, waving a dismissive hand. “Your pal and I kissed and made up—metaphorically of course—think we came to some terms of agreement we can both live with.” He laughs, humorlessly, “And hopefully won’t be the only ones to live with, in fact.” 

Bucky turns to Steve with a questioning look. Steve clears his throat. “I want to go back up—see who we can find to—to bring down here. To hide out while Stark works.” 

Bucky’s face is a complicated mixture of affection, concern, and resignation. But he nods. 

“Of course you do.”

“It’s the only right thing to do, Buck.” 

“I know,” he says softly, cupping Steve’s face with one hand. “I sort of wish I didn’t know you so well. But I wouldn’t like you half so much if I didn’t know you have to do this.” He chews on his bottom lip. “And I’ll be with you, of course I will. Whatever we do, gotta be together okay?”

Steve swallows hard around a lump in his throat, and nods his agreement, raising a hand to cover Bucky’s. 

Bucky just brushes a thumb across Steve’s cheek bone. “When do we start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, Howard as promised! Plus some watching-someone-sleep revelations, a personal favorite.


	10. Brave New World

Over the next days Steve and Bucky begin their own, tense sweep of New York—no longer trailing back behind the path of the Martians, but creeping ahead of them and doing their best to ferret out anyone resilient or lucky enough to still be hiding in the maze of the city in streets beginning to turn red with the clinging weed.

By the end of a week, they’ve collected nearly two dozen survivors—a fierce, dark-eyed Italian woman with two young sons, a pair of hard-edged dock workers, a whip-smart working girl who’d nearly taken Bucky’s head off with a baseball bat when they found her at the cathouse, among a motley variety of others. 

With multiple sets of hands now to do the work, they clear out the furniture from the antiques store front above. Now that it isn’t a cover for a top secret government facility, it seems unnecessary to leave it looking like a stocked shop—the Martians are unlikely to find it suspicious anyway. 

The hallway of Spartan offices becomes a series of bedrooms. The massive research hall is broken down into areas for supply staging and a common space which each new addition approaches cautiously, everyone slow to overcome the instinct for silence which has kept each of them alive to this point. But eventually they begin to relax a little, finding ways to be helpful and contribute to their new little community. 

Steve and Bucky take a small room together, nearest Howard’s workshop. Howard doesn’t claim an office, but just moves his army cot into his workspace, seeming to spend as many hours there on his feet as he’s able without falling over. So if he’s going to collapse with exhaustion his bed might as well be within reach. Steve quietly tasks Antonella, the woman with the two young sons, with making sure he eats and drinks something other than scotch. She takes to the assignment with zeal, and Steve has to cover a laugh when he catches her at it, Howard protesting the whole time but unable to resist her bossy ministrations. 

One day Bucky is in the shop above, collecting armloads of books with Louisa, a schoolteacher they’d found in the cafeteria of the high school with two of her students. Steve, down below in the great room sorting through their makeshift pantry, becomes aware of a low shudder passing through the ceiling of the space—his blood running cold immediately. 

He breaks for the bottom of the stairs, no thought in his mind but getting to Bucky, all the heads of the others gathered around turning to the noise too with varying shades of panic. There’s a crash as he hits the top of the first set of metal steps, and Bucky and the schoolteacher bang through the doors at the top of the stairs, panting. 

Bucky locks eyes with Steve, tumbling down the top steps to reach him where he stands frozen with fear and relief on the landing to sweep him into his arms. Steve wraps his own arms fiercely around Bucky’s neck, crushing their mouths together for a swift, desperate kiss. 

Somebody below clears their throat uncomfortably, and Bucky breaks away to glare down. It’s one of the weathered dockworkers—a stern man who Bucky had found buried under rubble and half carried back here days prior. The man meets Bucky’s challenging stare for only a moment, then looks away, chagrined. 

Annie, the plucky former prostitute, catches Steve’s eye and winks before giving a long, comical wolf whistle. Louisa, behind Bucky’s shoulder and leaning heavily on the rail as she catches her breath gives a small, encouraging smile.

And that’s that. Everybody returning purposefully to what they’d been doing before. 

(Later on John, the dockworker, corners Steve with a look of grim determination and Steve braces for a scuffle, ready for the punch—but John holds out his hand with a grunt. “Didn’t mean nothing by it,” he says. Steve shakes his offered hand. He knows John _did_ mean something by it, of course, but he’s chosen to bow to the prevailing winds of the group and put that aside, and that’s what counts. The next time a newcomer makes a sour face when he sees Steve brush Bucky’s hair out of his eyes over their supper, it’s John who catches his eye with a disapproving, warning glare.)

It feels good, for the days that it lasts, combing the city with Bucky by his side—helping people who had otherwise lost any hope. Steve falls asleep with Bucky curled at his back weary and footsore, but satisfied too that they’re doing what they can. 

And around them, the ragged band of survivors fall into place. 

Louisa takes over an empty storeroom for the books salvaged from the shop, and takes the children—who range from Antonella’s sons up to her own high schoolers on the cusp of adulthood—under her wing, reading and teaching and singing songs. It’s a small window of normalcy and optimism. 

Annie now wears a stained mechanic’s jumpsuit and has her platinum Jean Harlow curls tied up in a kerchief as she rearranges and assembles supplies for Howard’s efforts with cheerful pragmatism. When the rare, warm sound of laughter echoes now and then through the space, Steve is never surprised to look over to find Annie at the center of it. 

A handful of men task themselves with scrounging up top in quick, breathless little jaunts to bring back bedding, soap, clothes, aspirin—whatever they can find with reasonable odds of not getting caught. One night they liberate a case of gin from a smashed up liquor store, and are met with cheers at their return. 

All in all, by the end of a month, there are fifty of them clinging to existence in the tight, humming quarters of the SSR. 

But it doesn’t escape Steve’s notice that his and Bucky’s particular efforts are beginning to bear less and less fruit. 

It’s been three days since they found anyone up top still alive to bring back. Their searches have begun to roam further afield, and into more dangerous areas. They’d had a close call today, after watching a Martian machine knock a woman from a rooftop nearly beside where they were concealed, reaching a metal arm in feet from them to retrieve her body. 

Steve hadn’t been much up to facing any of the rest after they’d returned. So Bucky had swiped up a canteen of water and an MRE to share without comment, following him back to their cramped little room. 

They’d taken one of the smallest offices, to leave room for the families (a small but hopeful number) and groups of young people in the larger ones. The only furnishings are a lumpy, feather-filled cushion from a broken up sofa with its two faded back pillows pushed into one corner as a bed, a pipe where they’ve hung their one spare set of clothing apiece (half an SSR uniform for Bucky and a too large striped shirt for Steve), and a wall on which hangs an odd assortment of things. 

From Bucky’s contribution, two yellowing architectural drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge in wooden frames pilfered from upstairs. From Steve, a collection of crinkled newspaper stories—all commenting on the appearance of the green comets, and the odd reports coming from other towns about what they contain—each one horribly, comically naïve about what was coming. They were all written before the invasion of New York, and Steve hasn’t been able to help himself collecting them when he sees one scattered on the sidewalk or anywhere else. Bucky says it’s a sick fascination, but Steve claims it as professional interest. Former profession. He thinks about his sketch and story on the front page of the _Mill Tribune_ , too late to convince anyone to move to safety. But he couldn’t have known then. 

Now Steve trudges blindly past all of it, collapsing onto the bed with a shuddering sigh. 

“You wanna eat something?” Bucky’s soft voice asks above him. 

“No,” Steve says into the blanket against his mouth. 

“You had any water today?”

“Yeah—no—I dunno. Probably.” 

“Okay well probably means you’re gonna sit up and have some of this, at least.” Bucky says, flopping down to sit beside Steve with his back to the wall, legs hanging off the edge of the narrow cushion. 

Steve groans and pushes himself up to sit beside him, taking the offered canteen. He drinks greedily, draining half of it before handing it back to Bucky with a gasp, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. 

“Happy?” he asks, trying and failing not to sound sullen as he slumps back against the wall. 

“For now,” Bucky replies evenly, taking a drink himself. He lowers it, eyeing Steve over the mouth of it. “You’re not though.” 

“Any reason to be?” Steve asks. 

Bucky looks away with a wry, sad smile. “Nah, guess not.” 

Steve’s frustration bleeds away at once, forgetting his self-recriminations over the woman on the roof still falling in his mind’s eye, and realizing what he’s said. 

“Oh—Bucky I—I didn’t mean it like that—”

Bucky shakes his head, trying to brush of his protests, “I know, I didn’t take it any kind of way Steve. It was a rough one, today. For us both.” He looks up and meets Steve’s agonized gaze. “You know it ain’t easy on me either, right? Losing somebody like that? Coming back empty handed?”

Steve’s eyebrows come impossibly tighter together at Bucky’s tone, so soft and gentle when what he’s saying is so anguished. Steve hunches his shoulders, scooting closer to Bucky’s side and burying his face in his shoulder. 

“God that was a shitty thing to say, Buck—I _know_ you feel it too. I didn’t mean that I’m—that I’m the only one who cares. Or that I’m not still happy to have—you’re _the_ happy thing for me, I’m—”

“Steve,” Bucky cuts him off, tipping his chin up with one hand to look into his face. “You know I love you, right?”

Steve’s breath catches in his throat for a moment. But he feels the corners of his mouth tugging up despite him. 

“Yeah?” he manages in a small voice. 

Bucky nods, looking at him seriously. “Yeah. Realized today when we—I realized I haven’t said it. And I do.” 

“I—I love you too. So much,” Steve says. Bucky’s serious expression gives way to a tentative, answering smile. 

“Good,” he says. “Good I—I wanted to be sure that—that you knew.” 

Steve huffs. “I’ve known since you jumped off that fucking ferry…but it’s nice to hear it.” 

Bucky’s mouth curls into a smirk, “That right? Well I’ve known since you woke up in that grocery store and called out for me all panicky, thinkin’ I was gone—”

Steve laughs for real now, punching him lightly on the arm. “You jerk, I didn’t love you yet then—I’d just met you!”

“Ah well, you wanted me though already I bet—and that was on the track to the same result.” 

“Mmm,” Steve agrees, flicking Bucky a meaningful up-and-down look. “Guess I did.” 

“And now?” Bucky asks, trying to sound casual but not managing to keep himself from licking his lips. 

“Now I love you, and I still want you,” Steve says, leaning in slightly, but not far enough to make any actual contact. 

“How do you want me?” Bucky asks, voice grown low and dark sending sparks through Steve’s stomach. 

“Got some ideas,” Steve replies, equally low, this time moving from his spot to climb over Bucky, hands planted on his chest as he sinks back against the cushions, bringing Steve with him. 

Steve kisses him long and slow, working the buttons on his shirt open with practiced care. Being in constant danger side by side has continued to be a potent aphrodisiac (including one foolish, memorable time they’d had to run for their lives and ended up jerking each other off hasty and desperate in the kitchen of an abandoned restaurant in a heady rush of adrenaline). But Steve likes these moments the best, in the privacy of their own room—the SSR offices being designed for confidential conversations and thus utterly insulated from the outside world. Where they have the chance to be slow and tender with each other, mapping each other’s bodies and taking the time to linger over what makes the other fall apart. 

Bucky’s lips are warm on his neck as they shed the rest of their clothes in a hush of quiet breathing. 

“I love you,” Bucky whispers again in Steve’s ear as they begin to move together. 

Steve presses his mouth to Bucky’s in another unhurried kiss, savoring the taste of him. 

“I love you too.”

 

Later, lying pressed with flushed skin to skin, Steve listens to the steady sound of Bucky’s heartbeat in his ear. 

But as their skin cools, glow receding, the day is coming back down on him too—like a boulder sitting on his chest. He buries his face in Bucky’s neck, not wanting him to see. But it’s only a few more minutes before Bucky shifts in his arms with a sigh. 

“What’s wrong?” Bucky asks. 

Steve’s face twists a little, wishing he were better at hiding what he’s feeling from Bucky—and grateful that he can’t. 

“Same as before.” 

“Yeah.” Bucky replies heavily. 

“It’s just—” Steve tries to begin, voice pained. “It’s not enough, Buck. What we’re doing it’s—fifty-three people? It’s not good enough. Keep on like this they’re gonna finish with New York and start…start going after the ones who got out. Even if we found ’em, how many could we keep alive down here ’til Stark’s done? A hundred? Hundred fifty? That’s not—” he hesitates to give voice to the thought that’s been creeping in as their progress has waned over the passing days. “That’s not anything but a slower death for humanity even if we all make it.”

Bucky takes another long breath, then bundles Steve in his arms to roll them over so that they’re both lying on their sides, face to face. 

“I wish—” he says, brow creased. “I wish you were wrong.” 

“But I’m not.” Steve says, unsure of whether or not it’s a question. 

“You’re not.” Bucky says, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. He opens them again, holding Steve’s gaze. “So what now?”

Steve gives a small shake of his head. “I’m not sure.” 

Bucky smiles tightly, worry still taut around the corners of his eyes. 

“Well. Rest first, then pants, then…then we’ll see what we can do.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, pressing forward again into the warm circle of Bucky’s arms. “We can do that.”

 

Steve does up the buttons on Bucky’s shirt for him with the same careful attention he’d paid to undoing them in the first place. It’s entirely unnecessary, but Steve’s mom always taught him not to make a mess he wasn’t willing to clean up after, and he likes the patient, pleased smile Bucky gets on his face as he submits to the process. 

He combs his fingers through Bucky’s hair when he’s done, getting the disordered bedhead to lay flat—Steve’s always had the habit of fussing with his own bangs when he’s nervous, and it’s been nice instead transferring it onto Bucky as a quick, affectionate gesture before they leave their room. 

They’d managed to sleep for a few hours, by the hands of ornate grandfather clock in the main space. It’s a hulking relic leftover from the antique store that hadn’t been running before an old gentleman joined their ranks and lovingly spent several days taking apart the complex inner mechanisms and putting it all back together again. Now even down here without the sun to go by, they have some idea of the shape of their hours and days. 

It’s late now—or very early, anyway—and most of the company is tucked away in their own rooms. It seems to be human nature to observe their normal daytime and nighttime routines like they would on the surface. 

Steve and Bucky creep along the deserted hallway toward Howard’s workroom. It’s possible, of course, that he’ll be sleeping as well—but unlikely. The man is an engine of frenetic energy and only ever seems to shut his eyes three hours at a stretch. Though he’s been looking a little less unkempt as people have moved in, creating some semblance of routine and structure around him to be at least passingly aware of. He even shaves once in a while. 

But Steve isn’t surprised to find him perched on a stool in front of his long wooden work table, a welding mask over his eyes as he directs the flame of his torch at a sheet of metal in front of him. They wait until he flicks the thing off to let him know they’re there, a lesson learned from experience. 

Howard flips the welding mask up, turning to acknowledge them with a small nod. 

“Grab a stool fellas. Think it’s just about time for a drink.” 

He tosses the mask and the torch to the table, and splashes scotch (which he must have stockpiled somewhere Steve has yet to discover) into three tumblers. He sounds weary, Steve thinks, and there are lines of tension framing his mouth as he hands them both a glass. 

“What’s on your mind boys?” Stark asks, slumping back on his own stool, his back to his work. 

“How’s uh…how’s this going?” Bucky asks him, waving a hand at the various scraps of metal and mess of drawings scattered about. 

Howard’s face twists. “Hard to tell at this stage. Hard to know if this—if _anything_ —will be any damn use when I don’t know exactly what I’m—” he cuts himself off and takes a swig of scotch, settling his shoulders. “Sorry. Caught me at a bad moment, not my charming self I’m afraid. Come back in the morning and I’ll tell you all about my grand schemes.” 

Steve and Bucky exchange a look. 

“Ah now, don’t do that to me,” Howard says, his mouth curling up dryly as he observes the glance, “you’re talking in a secret code and it’s a bit rude when I don’t speak it. Seen that look enough times now to know you’re—” he gestures with his tumbler at Steve, scotch sloshing, “ _thinking_ about things again. Usually spells trouble for yours truly.” 

Bucky snorts, then buries his nose in his own glass when Steve raises his eyebrows at him. 

“We—” Steve starts, then amends resignedly, “yeah _I’ve_ been thinking. It’s just—we aren’t having so much luck. Finding anybody up there. I think…I don’t know if we can go on. Like we been doing.” 

Howard’s jaw clenches and he fixes his eyes on the amber liquid in front of him before he drains the rest and thunks the glass down beside him. 

“So I’ll ask again, what’s on your mind?”

“I guess I just wanted to check in and see what you think, now that you’ve had a month to get a start on…this.” 

Howard scoffs, “You wanted to see if you could harass me into moving a little faster this time? Answer’s same as it was before. I’m working as fast as I can with what I got—”

“So tell us what you need.” Bucky interrupts Stark’s annoyed tirade before he can work up to it, his response surprising both Howard and Steve into looking at him. 

Bucky’s jaw is set stubbornly, and his hand gripping his glass is white-knuckled. 

“Well?” he prompts. “What do you need that you don’t have to move this along fast enough to do some goddamn good up there?” 

Howard’s face turns thoughtful, considering. And before he opens his mouth, Steve is hit with a sudden premonition of what it is that he’s going to say. 

“To really get to work on this? Get started on something I know for _sure_ will do the trick?” Howard says, and Bucky nods affirmation. “For that, I need to get my hands on one of those heat rays.” He pauses, thinking. “Barring that I could maybe make some headway with any piece of their equipment, at least to figure out what kind of alloy they’re built out of. But yeah, you want this cracked in short order—I need a look at one of those guns.” 

There’s a crackling silence as his words sink in, the possibility and impossibility of what he’s asking for. 

“We’ll do it,” Bucky says. 

Steve sucks in a short breath, reaching out to grip Bucky’s arm. 

Bucky turns to him with a question on his face, and Steve holds his eyes. He nods. 

“Yeah. Of course we will.” 

“It’s the only way—right?” Bucky asks, “only chance for…for everybody left up top, the ones that got out…” 

Steve knows he means his family, hopefully sheltered somewhere north out of reach, but only safe until the Martians turn their attentions from the remains of the city, which might be any day. 

The machine’s exertions have been quieter and quieter these last few, and Steve and Bucky have discussed in hushed whispers the fact that they seem to have halted in their destruction. Maybe their awful work here is coming to a close, and next…

“I think so,” Steve agrees. 

Howard breaks in, though they’ve clearly been speaking just to one another now, “Ah that’s a fool’s errand—a suicide mission. Your odds are—well mathematically they aren’t great.” 

Steve keeps Bucky’s gaze for another long moment, searching his face for a sign of hesitation, that he’s rethinking what it is they seem just to have agreed to attempt. There’s only hard determination there. 

Steve turns to Howard, “Stark—it’s either we die up there on the slim ‘maybe’ that we could end it for everyone…or die some day down here on the guarantee that there’s nothing left for any of us. If we’re—if anyone’s making it out of this, we need you to get us there.”

Bucky nods. “Sounds like the only way that’s gonna happen in time is for somebody crazy enough to get you what you need.” He pulls his arm from Steve’s grip to twine their fingers together. 

Stark flicks his gaze back and forth between them, brows lowered in a frown. 

“Look I hear what you’re saying but…think it over okay? At least a day just—think about it.” 

His tone is uncharacteristically soft with concern, and Steve is surprised by a rush of gratitude toward him. 

“Yeah we’ll…we’ll take a day,” Steve says, and Bucky squeezes his hand in support. 

“Okay,” Stark says. 

He seems to see written on their faces what Steve already knows—that they won’t be changing their minds. But a day to plan, a day to be together in one last moment of peace before they throw themselves once more against the odds in the hope that maybe they have a final, shocking win in them—they’ll take that. 

And then they’ll go together into the jaws of death, to see if there is to be a long or very short future for the remaining people of earth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting down to the wire here in New New York folks. Thanks again for reading and commenting :)


	11. Requiem in Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second to final chapter! Wrap up/epilogue tomorrow :)

“Ready?” Bucky asks, hands clasped on either side of Steve’s face. 

“Ready.” Steve says, taking in Bucky’s blue eyes and cleft chin one more time as they steady themselves at the concrete door to the SSR. 

“Don’t want to take it back?” 

Steve shakes his head as much as he can with Bucky holding him. “Not this. Not any of it.” 

Bucky tips forward and kisses him. 

“I love you,” he says, holding Steve’s eyes another moment. 

“I love you too.” 

“Well…excelsior!” Bucky releases him and reaches for the lever to open the door. 

They didn’t quite take the day. 

They’d tried—they’d eaten and done their best to rest, hands never quite leaving each other without some point of contact over the brief hours—but ultimately knowing what they were planning to do it didn’t seem like there was a good reason to draw it out any further. Already up above the Martians might be planning to move, thwarting them in ways they haven’t even realized yet. 

It’s nearing dawn now, early enough still that the light won’t have begun yet to touch the city. Bucky bears a rifle scrounged from the SSR munitions stores. 

“You realize if you have to use that you’re going to let every other Martian in hearing distance know that we’re there, right?” Steve had asked, eyeing it as Bucky cleaned and checked it over in their room. 

“If I have to use it, I don’t think it’ll much matter at that point anyway.” Bucky had replied simply, not looking up from his task, “Just feels better to be holding something.” 

Steve had considered the wisdom of that, and eventually tucked a bayonet into the waist of his trousers. He wouldn’t know what to do with a gun if somebody handed it to him, and since it’s a placebo weapon anyway he figures it doesn’t make much difference if going up there with a knife is completely pointless. 

He checks it now in any case, making sure it’s secure along with the hank of rope over his shoulder, as Bucky heaves the sliding door on its track to let them through into the empty antique store. 

Their plan is simple, really. They’ll work their way through the city and find a machine as separated from the rest as they can. The things tend to slow—if not really doing anything recognizable as actual sleep—when the sun is down, grouped together near central park where they’ve been at work building in the last few weeks. And they’ve been particularly more dormant in the darkness of late, perhaps as their work has been trickling to a halt, or maybe just with the assurance that they have as much time as they want and can afford to take breaks. 

Before tonight, Steve wouldn’t have said he was particularly glad of their having had the opportunity recently to observe the build and structure of the Martian’s fighting machines in detail. Mostly that has meant close calls and erratic hearts racing as they prayed they’d be passed over. 

But they know at least what it is they’re going up against now. 

In each towering machine, one Martian sits in the dome—a pilot’s cockpit to direct the limbs of the thing and observe its environs, set atop the three huge legs, and outfitted with several mechanical arms for different purposes. Including the one that wields each creature’s heat ray—a funnel of metal about four feet long and a foot around at the wide end.

The legs, while tall and sturdy and smooth looking from afar, are actually wound and draped with thick coils of metal cable and wiring. 

So it’s up one of those that Bucky intends to climb. 

Their plan’s slim hope of success hinges on the Martian’s range of vision and the inflexibility of the metal cockpit to see something directly below and even attached to itself. Steve remembers back to Grover’s Mill—a lifetime ago—when the foot of one had come down right beside him and he’d thought himself dead already, but the machine had been focused instead on the people fleeing out in front of it and passed him by. 

Steve’s rope is meant to twine as quickly as he can around the thing’s three feet, perhaps hobbling or at least distracting it enough for Bucky to make it to the top. 

“It’s thirty feet Buck—you think you can make it?” Steve had asked with a frown—hesitant, but not having a better idea himself. 

“Sure I can!” Bucky had said with a cocky, sideways grin, “I was the fastest up the rope in basic every time, no contest.”

Steve isn’t sure if that was even true or just bravado for his sake, but he wants to believe it, so he does. 

Once high enough, he’ll do what he can to knock the heat ray out of the thing’s grip to Steve below and then—and this was the _most important_ Steve reminded him—get _down_ , fast as he can.

“You have to get back down Bucky—no giving up once you’re done up there, hear me? I need you to help me carry it if nothing else, okay?”

It’s an absolutely mad endeavor, a plan held together with spit and prayer. _But it’s better than nothing_ , Steve tells himself again as they slip through the antique store onto the street beyond, _and we’re out of time_. 

Outside the early November morning is cold and sweet after their long sojourn below with its circulated air. 

They set off up a street nearly entirely grown over now with the red weed, fleshy and wet under their shoes. 

Their pace is fast, but not an all-out run—they need to be sure they have the energy for what they’ll be facing— _and for their escape, after_ , Steve tells himself firmly—and there isn’t truly a need to rush toward it other than their spring-loaded nerves urging them to just do it already. 

They’re nearly twelve blocks from the SSR, nearing the Navy Yard, when the first rays of sun begin to spill over the skeletal remains of Brooklyn. 

It’s as if the entire world has been set ablaze—the red glow of dawn illuminating streets and buildings and trees and sidewalks crawling, dripping with scarlet. 

It feels somehow as if they’ve already been swallowed whole, and that the lurid scrabbling plants around them are really flesh, the belly of some great beast they’ve already fallen prey to. 

Just as it begins to feel like they truly are all alone, above it all rises a dismal howl. 

Both of them falter a moment, glancing nervously at each other as the eerie sound fills the air around them, settling into their bones. But they keep moving forward. 

It isn’t the chilling, triumphant hunting cry they’ve heard before, the one trumpeted by clusters of the things working in tandem to destroy. It’s a lone, haunting howl that seems to be giving voice to the deadened city around them, drawing them inexorably toward it. 

Steve’s heart skitters as they turn a final corner and see the top of a machine rising behind the row of buildings on the next street, swaying slightly in the early light. 

The Martian’s uncanny keening stops just as they come to a halt at the end of the block. In its absence, the world around them is dead-silent, unnerving Steve more even than the thought of what they’re about to do. The bone-deep quiet sinks into his mind, settles around him, and it’s easy to believe that maybe they too are already dead, subsumed by the red stillness. 

But then Bucky reaches out, squeezing his shoulder with a steadying grip, and he snaps back into the moment. Whatever their state might be after the next few minutes, they’re alive now and together and they have a job to do. 

Bucky raises his eyebrow, silently asking one last time “ready?”

Steve nods. 

They both take a deep breath—and then they hurl themselves around the end of the building, sprinting with all the speed they can muster toward the shadow of the listing machine. 

Flying strides get them to the base of it, with little more than a languid, shuffling step forward on the part of the giant metal creature before Bucky is aloft, scrambling up one towering leg. 

Steve down below yanks the rope from his shoulder, flinging one end around another massive metal column and yanking it into a rough knot, spinning to loop around and through the other points on the tri-pod, expecting at any moment to be snatched up in one of its wicked silver claws…

But the Martian doesn’t move, either to sweep him up with an arm or to step out of its weak bindings. 

Steve finishes unwinding the rope in and through the stationary legs, stopping with confusion when he reaches the end of it. He hadn’t really expected to get this far with the frail cord, the savagely strong creature being more than capable of snapping it with little effort…

He looks up and sees Bucky nearly to the bottom of the gleaming dome. And still the thing doesn’t move to stop them. 

Steve bites his cheek uncertainly, then eyes the leg Bucky has just climbed. It’s not much more work than climbing a ladder, with the Martian stood still. He shakes off his bewilderment and grips onto the metal cabling, clambering up after Bucky. 

He can’t see Bucky anymore as he climbs, he’s made it off the column of the leg and somewhere around the top of the dome. Steve climbs faster, resolutely ignoring the ground shrinking below him and what it would feel like if the Martian suddenly moved to dislodge him. 

Steve reaches the top panting, and then Bucky’s hand is there, gripping his to pull him up onto a narrow platform of metal around the pod. 

“What—?” Steve starts, breathless.

Bucky shakes his head, eyes wide and mystified as his own. “Look,” he says, edging around the top of the thing. 

Bucky has managed to pry open the door of the pod, into which its piloting Martian had climbed. 

Inside is a confusing bright mess of lights and wires and inner workings and—

And the creature controlling it all, slumped in the center. 

Steve hasn’t seen one of the Martians itself since that first terrible sighting as they’d climbed from their cylinder in Grover’s Mill, but he hadn’t forgotten the repulsive shape of them. Its huge, pulpy body fills the better part of the cockpit, tentacle-like arms wrapped around several levers and mechanisms. 

But the thing is…not right. 

Its flesh, which Steve remembered glistening like some sort of hybrid of leather and snakeskin in the floodlights of the field, is pale—dry like a husk in places. And its quivering, V-shaped mouth gapes and heaves like a caught fish. 

Steve and Bucky exchange a wary glance. One of its tentacles twitches ineffectually, but no more. 

Bucky shoots a questioning look at Steve, and Steve shrugs, as perplexed as he is. Bucky unslings the rifle strapped across his shoulder and plunges the bayoneted end into the creature’s bulk—one, two, three times, until it heaves one last wet, shuddering gulp and goes still. 

“What the fuck?” Bucky says. 

Something snaps inside of Steve—he can’t help it. He laughs, low and slightly hysterical. Bucky gives him a worried look, then back at the limp, disgusting body in front of them, until he lets out a weak chuckle too. 

“That wasn’t…um. Wasn’t quite what I was expecting.” 

Steve gasps himself into some composure, trying to get a handle on the nervous reaction he’s having to their being so very _not_ dead right now. 

“What do you think…happened to it?”

Bucky frowns in distaste, peering down at it, and Steve realizes this is probably the first time Bucky’s actually seen what the Martians look like outside of their constructed exoskeletons. 

“No idea—it doesn’t—doesn’t look very good? But I don’t really—it’s hard to tell.” 

Steve nods, understanding what he means. 

“They were a lot…slimier. When I saw them.” He remarks. Another bubble of relieved laughter rises in his chest at the absurdity of it. But he pushes it down, not wanting Bucky to worry that he’s lost his mind completely. He just really thought they’d be burned to ash at this point. 

“So should we—?” Steve asks with a frown, gesturing at the now utterly limp metal arm gripping the heat ray. 

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky cuts in, voice breathy, “look…”

Steve follows the line of Bucky’s arm where it points to the horizon, in the direction of Manhattan, eyes widening as he sees what Bucky means. 

Above the remaining skyline of the city, over what must be Central Park where the Martians have held their headquarters is a pulsing black cloud. 

At first he thinks it’s the Martian’s black smoke, but it moves strangely in starts and waves, and then he realizes—it’s birds. Dark swarms of carrion birds swooping over whatever lies below. 

“It—it can’t be,” Steve says, looking at Bucky again, mystified. “Can it…?”

“No fuckin’ clue,” Bucky says. “Should we—?”

Steve scrapes his bangs out of his eyes, looking down at the funnel in the machine’s still grasp. He hesitates…it’s what they’d come for, with every expectation of failure but…

“We can…we should go look, right?” he says, “this one isn’t going anywhere, we can…we can come back after we…check it out.” 

“Right,” Bucky says, and his tone is decisive now with a goal and some semblance of a plan in mind. “Yeah. Just…reconnaissance, and then we’ll get this to Howard.” 

With a last, revolted look at the limp body in the pod, they both lower themselves from the platform to shimmy down the lifeless leg to the ground. 

They set a brisk pace toward Central Park, the center of the Martian’s operations which they have skirted and avoided at all cost over the past month of their furtive wanderings. 

A few blocks away the thinly stretched silence gives way to the beginning of something no less unsettling. At first it’s the high pitched calls of crows that cut through the dampened streets. Then as they get nearer, creeping slowly now, the sounds of other birds and whoosh of wings punctuated occasionally by the snarl and snap of a dog. 

Three blocks from the park they spot one of the squat spider-like collection machines half-buried under a collapsed storefront wall, legs akimbo. It looks like the thing had driven headlong into the building and been crushed under its own destructive force. 

Steve and Bucky still pause warily with a row of buildings between themselves and the park. Whatever may be happening there, it seems unwise to plough toward it too recklessly—caution and the instinct to hide have become second nature. 

Bucky eyes the alley beside them. 

“Think it’s got roof access?” he asks Steve in a whisper, gesturing toward a dented metal door in the back wall of one. 

“Worth a shot,” Steve replies. 

They pry the twisted door open as quietly as they can, and make for the stairs. 

Ten flights up, and they’re rewarded with a sign at the final landing: roof access. 

They let themselves out onto the roof, the brittle sun of a November morning now shining bright and fully on them as they cross the concrete space to peer over the edge of the wall to the scene below. 

Spread out beneath them is a scene of utter chaos—the Martian machines toppled and rigid amongst their strange mounded shelters and other, half-built machinery. Every one of them unmoving. In some of the overturned machines the bodies of their Martian pilots hang limp and shredded, victims of the swooping birds who have evidently spent some time tearing at them in death. 

“They’re—they’re dead,” Steve says, unnecessarily. Bucky just looks over at him with his mouth agape. 

Then a wild, disbelieving grin splits his features. Bucky throws back his head and lets out an outrageous whoop that echoes across the deserted streets below. Steve flinches out of habit, but the only response is a chorus of dogs barking over their dinner. Steve lets his own answering grin take over his face. 

Bucky, laughing still with the absurd impossibility of it, sweeps Steve into his arms, spinning him in a galloping circle across the roof. Steve laughs too until Bucky puts him down, dizzy, and he steadies himself with his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. 

“How did this happen?” He asks, though he knows Bucky doesn’t have the answer. 

Bucky just shakes his head, his eyes gleaming with feverish triumph. 

“No idea. But I think it’s time to go and fetch Howard.” 

They both take a final glance at the strange, miraculous brutality of the pit, the sun gleaming on the now harmless domes of the towering machines which had until so recently held the city and even the earth in their fist. 

Then they take to the stairs, to the reddened street, hand in hand to make for Brooklyn, uncertain of the source of their victory but with hearts soaring high as the tops of the buildings. 

 

It’s like this. 

After Steve and Bucky return to the SSR, throwing open the concrete door and clanging down to the main hall both talking loud and breathlessly over one another and scaring the collected people half to death, they drag Howard up and out to the scene of the Martian’s final throes. 

And after some examination he returns a hypothesis. 

The Martians, immeasurably more advanced than earth in their technology back on their red home planet, seem to have long since eliminated any and all disease from their society. It’s how they were able to work so tirelessly, without need for rest for so many weeks. 

But it’s also why, the moment they had opened their wicked metal cylinders to the atmosphere of earth, they had begun to be defeated before they ever started their ruthless reign of horrors. 

Earth’s ecosystem, which humankind has earned the right to live with over its centuries of evolution, is full of bacteria, viruses, and parasites in the very air to which the Martian’s highly advanced bodies had no immunity. They’d been slowly poisoning themselves with the air, the water, the blood of the people they’d collected, welcoming the means for their deaths without knowing they were doing it. 

“They were killed by—by the fucking flu?” Steve asks, incredulous all over again. 

Howard shrugs. “Flu, rhinovirus, rotavirus, strep, TB—anything you can catch that’ll put you down for a dose of chicken soup and bed rest could have done it.” 

Steve laughs. He thinks about all the hours of his childhood swallowed up by colds and illness and runny noses and sore throats and headaches. How he’d hated the illnesses that dogged him. And how he’d survived them. 

“Probably want to see if we’ve got any pathologists still clinging to existence around to take some samples and confirm,” Howard says, standing up and wiping his hands on his trousers, giving the metal shell beside him a shove with his foot. “But that’s my best guess.” 

Behind him, members of the SSR community have straggled up behind the three of them, finally understanding what it was that Steve and Bucky had been shouting about in their urgent excitement. 

Steve watches as a few react like he and Bucky had, in wide-eyed laughter. A few others begin to cry in a mixture of relief and disbelief. 

It’s too early to tell what the coming days will bring, how many of those that had fled will return, how many there still are who have been clinging, like them, to survival in isolated corners of the city. 

But nobody can doubt the evidence of their eyes, the report of the black cloud of birds still circling above: New York, earth, all of them—are improbably, impossibly free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eeeeeeeek! I really can't wait to hear your thoughts on this...people who knew the book, people who didn't, what'd you think??


	12. Epilogue: Something Worth Living For

In the days that follow, the survivors don’t put society back together. The old earth as they knew it is gone. 

But they do begin to build something new. A new earth rising from the ashes of the old, haunted by everyone and everything that they’ve lost, but strong too at all the broken places. The barriers that had once divided them from each other, the things which had defined them—rich, poor, queer, immigrant, weak, strong, man, woman—have lost their power under the greater truth that each of them is _human_ and _alive_. 

It isn’t easy, and it isn’t immediate, not in hearts that have known nothing but how to view fellow people by how they are _other_. But it is necessary and it is absolute. It’s survival, and even the most reluctant have no choice but to relearn and to bend to this new reality. 

The afternoon of the discovery of the Martians’ timely demise, members of the SSR community spread through the city to the remaining cathedrals and churches that still have a standing tower and set all of the bells ringing. The joyous peals echo through streets which for a month haven’t heard any noise but the rumble of destruction, drawing anyone who hears them out of hiding. 

To Steve’s immense relief, the SSR wasn’t the only group of people who’d managed to hide themselves away from the Martian rampage. A city engineer had gathered nearly sixty in an icehouse underground in Crown Heights. Beneath St. Patrick’s Cathedral two priests and the rabbi from Central Synagogue had managed to shelter a hundred of its combined congregants and their families. All across the city smaller groups clustered in basements and bomb shelters and subway tunnels begin to pour back to the streets above. 

Howard Stark, easily the most recognizable of the surviving New Yorkers, finds himself a hub of the scattered people trying to reorganize. It’s convenient, to have someone people recognize and trust, even if he isn’t interested at all in taking charge (he’s busy taking apart Martian tech and trying to repair communication lines to other cities so they have some idea of what’s going on in the rest of the world). Instead he directs them to his trusted lieutenants. 

Annie and the city engineer, a capable older man named Richard, take command of a team they term Safety and Salvage, working in tandem to determine which of the remaining structures are still sound enough to live and work in, and removing anything useful from the rest before they are cordoned off. Together they direct a hundred people in collecting supplies and getting folks settled. If Steve might have worried about anyone taking orders from Annie, he doesn’t need to. Richard accepts her partnership without blinking, and by the end of the week nearly everyone is housed and several warehouses have begun to take shape with the amassed supplies. 

Louisa the schoolteacher continues the work she’d begun in the bowels of the SSR, collecting the children. The thought of a full school is still a ways off, especially for the remaining parents hesitant to let them out of their sights yet—but there will be, one day. And for now Louisa makes sure that every child has somewhere to go and a way to keep busy if they want it. 

(And when Louisa and Annie take one of the newly cleared apartments together, neither Steve or Bucky is surprised.)

Bucky, it turns out, has a knack with his hands and for fixing up the broken parts of buildings that are safe enough simply to fix instead of condemn. He spends his days with a team of workers and a toolbox scraped together for him personally by Annie, coming home to Steve at the end of each exhausted, grimy, and utterly satisfied. 

As for Steve, he takes up the task of organizing that Howard wants desperately nothing to do with. With communication lines destroyed and everyone now living clustered in Manhattan regardless of their previous addresses, he knows that taking stock of everybody who’s left will be imperative for helping those alive find their people. So he sets himself up an office in what was a bank, emptying filing cabinets and beginning to take a census of everyone now in the city: their names, their previous and current addresses, their relations. 

In the following weeks as people begin to return from wherever they had managed to flee, they come to Steve to put their names on the rolls and find out if anyone they’re looking for is still there. It’s sad work—the answer is ‘no’ much more often that it is yes. But it’s worth it for the times when someone comes to him with a name, looking hopefully at Steve, and he’s able to pull a card from his cabinet and tell them _yes the person you love is waiting for you_. As the numbers of those returning increases, he takes on three assistants to help deal with the flow. 

He’s sitting at his desk in the vaulted lobby space one day nearly three weeks after the fall of the Martians. It’s nearing sunset, and around him the golden glow of late afternoon pours in the windows which didn’t have to be boarded up from being smashed. Outside the world is still redder than any of them would like—the weed which had climbed its way over everything has slowly begun to perish like its sentient counterparts, but slower, and one of the tasks the has kept many hands busy has been the systematic clearing of it. 

He’s tired, and his back aches a little from a day spent mostly on his feet organizing and filing and sorting. So he looks up wearily when a little, tentative cluster of people enters the space and makes its way toward him. Steve sighs, bracing himself to give his patented bad news, which he always cushions with “but we’ll let you know if they come here,” even if both he and the other person know the chances aren’t high. It’s not a lie, he tells himself every time, it’s always possible. 

A woman with dark brown hair streaked with white approaches him, a grim but determined set to her jaw. 

“We were told we should come here to register, we’ve been north. And to—to find out if—”

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence, Steve nods in understanding as he reaches for a card and pen. 

“Name?” he asks, politely. “Then you can let me know who you’d like me to look for…”

“Barnes,” the woman says, “It’s Winifred Barnes. And I’m—”

Steve drops his fountain pen in a clatter of ink, and the woman blinks in surprise at him. 

“I—” Steve begins, a smile spreading across his face as he looks past her to the others who came in with her, three young women and an older one, “Alice, Janey, Mary? Is that right?” 

The woman’s brow furrows in question, “Yes, that’s us, has someone already—?”

But Steve’s already flinging himself around the desk, and he throws his arms around the perplexed woman, Bucky’s mother, who gives a startled noise as he hugs her tight for a moment. 

“I—I’m sorry Mrs. Barnes, you don’t—I’m Steve, Steve Rogers.” He says, a small laugh bubbling in his chest that he can’t quite contain. “Bucky, he—god he’ll be so glad you’re alright!” 

The confusion fades from Mrs. Barnes face and she grips Steve’s arms tightly, intent on his face, “So he’s here? He made it through?” 

“Yes!” Steve gasps, nodding emphatically, “he’s okay—we took a place near the park, you have to come home with me, he’ll be so—I’m _so glad_ you’re here.” 

Mrs. Barnes quirks an eyebrow at him, “Come home with—with the two of you?” she asks. 

Steve colors immediately, stammering a little. He has no idea, he realizes, how much Bucky’s family knows about his particular inclinations that way, and he’s worried he may have just stumbled into a bit of a shocking reveal for her. Not that he thinks Bucky wouldn’t tell them now, if he hasn’t before—the time for that is over—but he hopes he didn’t just do it by accident. 

But Mrs. Barnes gives him a small, knowing smile and squeezes his arm again. “I see. Steve…it’s—it’s good to meet you. And we will be so happy to—can we go now? To see Bucky, let him know we—?”

Steve swallows down the nervous flutter his heart had jumped into, smiling back. “Yeah—yes, of course. We’ll go now. He usually comes home when the sun goes down, he should be back soon.” 

“Do we—shall I still fill out one of your cards?” she asks. 

Steve shakes his head, grin taking over his features again. “No, not—later. He wouldn’t want to wait another moment. We’ll go now.” 

She looks relieved. “Thank you.” 

Steve grabs his coat up from the back of his chair, and lets one of his helpers know that he’s leaving before taking Mrs. Barnes elbow and guiding her back to the doors through which they’d just come. Now when he glances at her from the corner of his eye he can see that her face is lined and creased with weariness, though it still has the strength and resolve that he imagines brought them through the massacre. 

“Girls,” she says as they approach Bucky’s sisters and a very old woman who Steve guesses must be the neighbor they’d brought out with them, “this is Steve. He’s taking us—taking us to Bucky. To their home.”

Alice, the oldest of the three, smirks, while Jane remains impassive. She’s the quiet one, Steve remembers Bucky saying. Mary, sagging in Alice’s grip, doesn’t react at all, just blinking at him in disinterested exhaustion. 

They make their way in a not too uncomfortable silence through town. A little over a hundred thousand have returned to repopulate it, and though it’s far from the teeming life it had when several million lived here, it feels bustling to Steve in comparison to the desolation he’d witnessed before. He sees Mrs. Barnes and the girls eyeing the still chaotic half-destruction around them with looks of mixed sadness and relief. 

She flinches when they turn up Steve and Bucky’s block, and Steve follows her eye line toward Central Park, where several of the huge gleaming Martian machines still stand or slump across the ground. They’d buried the bodies of the creatures, and Howard had removed a few of the machines for examination, but the rest were too cumbersome to move at once. It isn’t a priority when they simply stand lifeless and there are people to be fed and housed and delegated tasks. Steve has found over the passing weeks that he doesn’t actually mind. It seems fitting for them to remain, a monument to the ordeal they’ve all overcome. He’s even seen a handful of children, ever more resilient than adults, scampering over and climbing them like odd jungle gyms. 

“They’re too big to move easily, yet,” Steve explains in a gentle tone to Mrs. Barnes, “I expect we’ll dismantle them eventually but for now…there’s nothing to them anymore.” 

She nods, stiffly, and redirects her eyes to the street. 

They’d taken a townhouse alongside the park, in the center of the efforts in the new regrouping of people. 

Steve and Bucky had laughed themselves silly when they first entered it—it’s the kind of place they never would have even seen the inside of their entire lives before. But the Martians had done the least damage to the houses directly surrounding their staging grounds, and so it makes sense to begin moving folks in here even if most of them are in the same, incredulous boat about their new addresses. Unfortunately nearly everything in them had been coated and ruined with black ash, so they’re all sparsely furnished—but it’s plenty for people who thought they had nothing. 

“What do you think, Mr. Rockefeller?” Bucky had asked Steve with a ridiculous grin, “Bit small of course but I suppose we make due…”

“Mmm indeed, Mr. Carnegie, I think it will do nicely,” Steve had replied. 

They mount the entry stairs, and Steve spots Bucky’s coat on a hook in the front entry with a flutter of anticipation. 

“Buck—you here?” He calls, the Barnses trailing him into the living room, trying to keep his excited voice even. 

“Yeah hang on!” Bucky calls from somewhere back toward the kitchen. 

“Come’ere would you?” Steve yells. 

“Alright, alright, jesus, give a guy a second to…” Bucky comes through the door, wiping his hands on a dishcloth, arms streaked with grime from his day of work. But he trails off the second he sees that Steve isn’t alone. 

“Ma?” he says, eyes wide, frozen in place just for a moment. Then he snaps from his surprise, flinging himself across the room and into his mother’s arms, tears instantly springing to his eyes. “Ma! You’re _here_ you—” 

He chokes over the end of the sentence and his mother wraps him up in her arms. She’s shorter than him by a head and he has to duck low for her to put her arms about his neck, his head tucked to her shoulder as she strokes his back and makes soothing noises. 

“I’m here James, shh, Bucky it’s okay we’re all okay…”

Steve feels his own throat grow a little tight at the sight, thinking for the first time in many weeks of his own mother soothing him. He feels his eyes prickling. But it’s not resentful. His chest is soaring with gladness for Bucky being able to reunite with the family he fought so hard to reach. 

Finally, Bucky’s able to release his mother to embrace each of his sisters and Mrs. Donnelley in turn. Mrs. Donnelley is an ancient woman who looks to be at least as tired as Mary, and she stays largely quiet, listing a little where she stands. At last his eyes turn to find Steve, and he steps back beside him and twines their fingers together. 

“Ma, this is Steve.”

Mrs. Barnes gives him a soft smile, nodding. “We met.”

Bucky’s eyes dart between them for a moment, curiously. Then he smiles too, and releases a breath. “Oh. Good.” He leans over and places a quick, light kiss on Steve’s temple. 

“Are you all hungry?” Steve asks. “Or if you want to sleep we can—we’ve only got supplied for the two of us at the moment but we can make do for tonight, and go down to the stores and get set up for you all in the morning…”

“I can even cook something,” Bucky says, with a dopey sideways grin. 

“Now that I’m not sure I want to see,” pipes up Alice with another smirk. 

Bucky punches her lightly on the shoulder. “Hey I survived on it this long haven’t I? I can promise it won’t kill ya.” 

“Hmph,” says Alice. 

“Hungry, tired, all of it,” Mrs. Barnes agrees, cutting a not-too-serious warning glance at her daughter. “But I’ll come with you and help with dinner. I want you in my sight for a little while first.” 

Bucky ducks his head, smiling. 

“You come too, Steve,” Mrs. Barnes says, reaching out and brushing Steve’s ever troublesome bangs out of his eyes, a maternal gesture that makes Steve’s throat feel momentarily tight again. “I’d like to know you better.” 

“Come on Mrs. Donnelley, let’s find you a chair,” Jane says in a very soft voice, leading the old woman away. “Mary, you stay out of trouble, hear me?”

That night they eat a hasty but filling dinner of spaghetti (which Alice insists does _not_ actually count as cooking) seated cross-legged on the living room floor in front of the fireplace. 

Steve can tell that Bucky is absolutely and deliriously pleased to be with his family again after the weeks and weeks of worry. But Bucky’s eyes, in between drinking in all of their tired but familiar and healthy faces, always come back to Steve. So Steve doesn’t feel left on the outside as he feared he might, but feels his own shared glow of happiness—because he isn’t alone. Bucky is his family, and Bucky’s family is his too. 

They give up their stock of bedding for the girls to sleep in that night, promising to resupply for the now seven of them in the morning. It’s quite cold edging into December, so they set up near the fireplace for the evening. 

“It’s alright Steve, I’ve got you to keep me warm anyhow,” Bucky says, low into Steve’s ear so that only he can hear, making him blush. But they do stay warm enough, tucked up together in their sparse bedroom. 

Over the following days, Bucky’s mother and sisters move into the empty rooms of their townhouse, and suddenly the huge hollow spaces of their new residence begin to feel like home, full of laughter and cooking and the footsteps of family. 

On their rooftop, Steve begins a small garden of mismatched pots and planter boxes Bucky cobbles together for him with scrap wood from his work. Jane helps, and it turns out that she has much more of a green thumb than Steve. Eventually Mary joins them as well, with little skill but a keen interest in mucking around in the dirt. Steve likes the hours that they spend there in the chill of the December sun, planting bulbs and things they’ve scavenged and hope to see grow in the spring. 

And then it’s Christmas. Bucky’s mother takes over in the kitchen, making a special meal they all eat in front of their cheery fireplace in the living room, now outfitted with enough chairs that no one has to sit on the floor—though Mary does anyway, to put her back to the blaze. Mrs. Donnelly gives them all a pair of socks she’s spent the past weeks knitting in her usual corner seat beneath the tall front windows. 

Afterward, when the Christmas pie has been eaten and all the dishes cleaned, Steve and Bucky sneak together up to the rooftop, hand in hand and bundled against the cold. 

They spend a while in silence looking out over the city. There are lights now scattered regularly around them, other homes where people are carving out a new way to live in this unexpected future. And they can see stars too, something that was rarely possible in New York City before—but without the smog and lights of several million people the milky way shines bright above them, luminous and lovely. 

“Think they’re up there still, regrouping?” Bucky asks Steve in a hushed whisper. 

Steve hums a little. “I don’t know. Maybe. But Stark will make sure we’re ready, next time, if they are.” 

“Yeah,” Bucky replies, tone thoughtful. 

Below them the city is quiet. The world, Steve thinks, is like this makeshift little garden. It doesn’t look like much at the moment—it’s all cobbled together pots and dirt and dormant seeds. But there’s potential to it, new growth waiting for its chance and a little care to bring it about. They’ve received word at last from Europe and beyond—the Martians had been strategic in their initial attack, decimating armies and governments first in their attempt to confuse and scatter humanity. But it means that the looming menace of Hitler and his Reich was burned to ash, along with the rest. It will be a long time before anybody regains the ability, much less the interest, in fighting one another. There’s too much to build first. 

“Steve,” Bucky says, softly against Steve’s temple, his breath ruffling Steve’s hair. 

“Yeah Buck?” 

“Can I say something that’s probably really wicked, and you not think less of me?”

Steve chuckles. “Go ahead.” 

Bucky turns so that he’s standing in front of Steve rather than beside him, and loops his arms around Steve’s waist, looking down into his face seriously. 

“I know…I know that everything that’s happened was terrible and a tragedy and a lot of people—well. It was awful. But just right this moment I—I can’t be sorry about any of it. I’m too happy being just exactly right here.” 

A small smile curves Steve’s mouth. “I think…I know what you mean. I love you too.” 

Bucky leans in then, mouth warm as it presses against Steve’s. 

And they kiss at their leisure, in the absence of danger and the anticipation of doing it many more times in the days and weeks and years that come—surrounded by the still, expectant quiet of a world that’s ready to begin again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so so much to those of you who have read, kudoed, and commented. The writing and posting process for this particular fic ended up being sort of unusual for me compared to past ones. To the handful of you who were FULLY on board throughout I just want you to know I really did end up writing for you guys and looking forward every day to hearing what you thought--you all deserve excellent karma this month!! I have a very warm spot in my heart for you guys. 
> 
> If you're reading this sometime down the line now that it's all up, drop me a note and let me know what you thought!

**Author's Note:**

> Alpha and beta thanks always to [@calendulae](https://calendulae.tumblr.com/) (on tumblr, check her out). 
> 
> Find me on tumblr too, I welcome your comments, ramblings, questions, whatever at [odette-and-odile.](http://odette-and-odile.tumblr.com/)


End file.
